MTV uses its passing familiarity with music to name the year's best artists and songs

By Sean O'Neal | December 15, 2011 | 11:37pm

Aux Features Music

In what the network says it hopes will become “an annual thing,” MTV has started paying attention to music, offering for the first time in its 30-year history awards and rankings of the medium’s best artists and songs, completely independent from whether or not they also had an accompanying video (but especially if they also totally did). They then gave these best artists and songs a place of esteem next to other, more expected MTV accolades citing the year’s Best Hair, Best Cries, Biggest Breakups And Makeups, and even Best Nude Photo Leaks. Congratulations, music! You made it.

To determine their winners, MTV gathered an internal “brain trust” roundtable composed of various MTV employees and "moderated by Sway," as all democratic assemblies must be, whereupon they considered the many things one must consider when choosing the standout musicians and songs of the year, i.e. they “pored over the charts, debated stuff like Facebook friends and Twitter followers, and watched a ton of music videos.” And using those metrics by which modern music is always measured and properly evaluated, here are 2011’s Top 10 songs and artists, according to MTV. See you next year, MTV’s Best Music Awards and also, presumably, most of the artists on these lists.