THE RADIO WINS ITS UNLIKELIEST STAR

The iHeartRadio Music Awards are, at heart, a broadcast-radio prize. The Best New Artist category is decided by a combination of national airplay, station-level engagement, and listener callouts on the network's own morning shows. It is, in other words, a prize decided by top-forty programmers, in top-forty markets, playing top-forty formats. On Sunday night it went, uncontested on the final ballot, to LUCA STARR, whose lead single, La Dernière, is four and a half minutes long, has no vocals, and, until October, was not on any top-forty station in the country.

What changed, per interviews with fifteen program directors across the top ten U.S. markets, was that listeners started asking for it by name. That does not happen with instrumentals. It has not happened, in living memory, at any scale that mattered to the format. This year it happened. It happened enough that stations that had never played a classical release in their entire broadcast history started playing La Dernière in the seven-o'clock hour, unedited, at four and a half minutes long, on top-forty rotation.

“The radio is a small speaker in a car. I've listened to a lot of music through a small speaker in a car. It's a good speaker. It knows what the song is.”

He is, per iHeart's own count, the youngest Best New Artist winner in the ceremony's history. He is also the first instrumentalist to take the category. He accepted the award in his usual manner, which is to say briefly, without a card, with two hands on the podium and a small nod at the end. He thanked the drivers, by which he meant, per a follow-up, the people who had listened to the record on car speakers on their way to work.

Amara Starr, his sister and manager, said the family had not, at any point, run a radio-promo campaign. “We do not have a radio-promo person. We have never had a radio-promo person. Program directors called us. That is not how any of this normally works. That is how it worked this year.”

Two of those program directors, reached for comment, said the same thing, in slightly different words. Callouts drove the add. The record was on the phone-request line. It was there because the record was, on the audience-facing side, the only quiet thing in a very loud format. “My drivers are exhausted,” one program director, in Chicago, said. “They are commuting an hour each way. They wanted, for four minutes, to hear something that let them think. He is what they picked. I did not pick him. They did.”

The trophy is a small clear glass block with the iHeart logo etched inside it. STARR, backstage, held it up to the light, looked through it at the ceiling, and said, quietly, “It's like a piece of ice.” Then he handed it to his sister, and asked if there was, anywhere in the venue, a quiet room. There was. He went to it, closed the door, and, per a stagehand, played nothing at all for twenty minutes.