TOP NEW ARTIST, TOP OF THE CHART, TOP OF THE ROOM

Top New Artist at the Billboard Music Awards is decided by chart performance. It is not voted by fans, and it is not voted by the industry. It is voted by the year. On Sunday night the year voted for LUCA STARR, a thirteen-year-old pianist from Loudoun County, Virginia, whose debut record, The Bottom of the Ocean, has now spent thirty-one weeks on the Billboard 200, seven of them in the top five, and whose lead single, La Dernière, an instrumental, has spent twenty-two weeks on the Hot 100, peaking at No. 3.

These are not classical numbers. These are not niche numbers. These are pop numbers. They are the reason the award, this year, was uncontested. Billboard's chart methodology does not care what a record sounds like. It cares what a record does, week over week, on the ledger. La Dernière has done, on the ledger, what an instrumental has not done in decades.

“I don't watch the chart. My sister watches the chart. I ask her how the record is doing. She says fine. That's the whole conversation.”

Amara Starr does watch the chart. She has watched it, per her own admission, every Wednesday morning for the last thirty-one weeks, from a kitchen in Loudoun County, with a mug of coffee that goes cold before she remembers it. “It is not real to me,” she said. “It has not been real to me since the second week. He is thirteen. He is on the Hot 100. There is no world in which this is real.”

Billboard has, for the last decade, been trying to figure out what to do about the collapsing wall between classical and pop. This is the year the wall stopped being a wall. STARR is, per the same methodology, the first classical instrumentalist to be named Top New Artist at the Billboard Music Awards since the category was created in its current form. He is, per the ceremony's producers, the youngest performer ever to take the stage on his own during the live broadcast without a co-star or a band.

What he did on that stage, per our people in the room, was almost embarrassing in its simplicity. He walked out, sat down at a Steinway, played the middle section of La Dernière, unamplified for the first thirty seconds because the sound crew had not, apparently, expected him to just start, and then walked off. The camera cut to the audience, which included, in one shot, two artists who had campaigned aggressively for the same trophy, and both of whom applauded, at length, for a boy they had, until Sunday night, not met.

The trophy is now on the family upright next to the AMA. STARR, per his sister, went to bed at nine thirty. He has school in the morning.