This year's Grammy ceremony wasn't just bad, it was spectacularly bad. The producers in charge of the show didn't just make the same mistakes they've made in previous years, they somehow managed to make new mistakes, missteps and completely misjudge what makes a good show. To their credit, the show did fly by, some parts were decent, namely, Lady Gaga and Elton John's performance, and, uh, they got 26 million people to watch it, 35 percent more than last year, but that's it! How did everything go so, completely wrong?

4. If you're going to do a tribute to Michael Jackson, pull out all the stops. This was the year the biggest pop icon in recent history died, and the Michael Jackson tribute was for a song nobody cared about, in 3-D (for which most people didn't own the glasses it took to view it in), that was essentially the same as what was in This Is It, just with an unsurprising superstar lineup. Of all the things to go big for, why'd they go so small on this? Sure, it was kind of exciting to see Celine Dion, Carrie Underwood, Usher, and Jennifer Hudson on the same stage...but certainly nothing that blew anybody away. This moment went by without something substantial happening, and it shouldn't have.

3. Correct your audio mix, or at least make sure your star performers sound decent. Taylor Swift has put in great TV performances before. Her Saturday Night Live show, for one. So why, on the biggest night of the year, did she sound so patently pitchy?

2. Crusty White Censors: Lil' Wayne, Eminem, Drake, and Travis Barker might've had the show of the night! But we wouldn't know, because CBS had a heavy index finger on the audio delay for almost the entirety of their song. Vulture chronicled the lyrics, but honestly, the song was after 10:30, when the kids were asleep, and nobody got to hear anything. Why book them in the first place if you think they even run the risk of a network having to ruin their entire performance? Because they can depend on the internet to get through it, naturally.

1. Keep It Simple, Stupid: Why does every act have to have something so intensely special about it if it's not special? Did Pink really have to do the aerial acrobatics? Beyonce didn't really need a Rhythm Nation-redux that included a verse of Alanis Morisette. The mess that was Jamie Foxx, Slash, T-Pain, Opera Singers, and whoever else was on stage was totally absurd. Why couldn't the best bands get small, simple performances? Phoenix, who won the award for Best Alternative Album, wasn't even seen during the telecast, and they're a band that could've done a great, high-concept performance. The bands the Grammys did give relatively small-scale performances to -- the Zac Brown Band and Dave Matthews Band, who still had an enormous chorus with them -- didn't even have any excitingly massive hits this year, and the point is to let these bands' music shine. Like the Foo Fighters with orchestration (arranged by John Paul Jones), a perfect example: we don't need special effects, or high-concept shows, we just need smart pairings, and we need them to let the music sound better than it does every other night of the year, which this time around, it simply didn't.