The veteran rapper Jay Z topped the nominees list for the 2014 Grammys that was announced on Friday, with nine nods. Taylor Swift and Daft Punk are also among those in the running in the major categories.
Close behind, with seven nominations apiece, were the Californian hip-hop star Kendrick Lamar and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, as well as Justin Timberlake and Pharrell Williams. The rapper Drake scored five nominations.
In the coveted Album of the Year category, Swift’s Red will compete with the French electro duo Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s The Heist, Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and Sara Bareilles’s The Blessed Unrest.
The Record of the Year candidates are Daft Punk & Pharrell Williams’s Get Lucky, the New Zealand teenager Lorde’s Royals, Radioactive by Imagine Dragons, the Hawaiian crooner Bruno Mars’s Locked Out of Heaven and Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, made infamous by Miley Cyrus’s twerking at the MTV Video Music Awards show earlier this year.
Shortlisted for Song of the Year – for songwriters, as opposed to performers – are Just Give Me A Reason performed by Pink Featuring Nate Ruess; Locked Out of Heaven performed by Bruno Mars; Roar performed by Katy Perry; Royals performed by Lorde, and Same Love performed by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis.
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis have also been nominated for Best New Artist and are up against James Blake, Kendrick Lamar, Kacey Musgraves and Ed Sheeran.
The nominees in key categories were announced during an hour-long concert at the Nokia Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.
The 56th annual Grammy awards show will be held on January 26 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.