Before 2010, American Music Awards nominations were based on sales and airplay.
This system emphasized measurable commercial performance rather than a voting body’s artistic judgment. Record sales indicated how strongly audiences bought an artist’s releases, while airplay measured how frequently songs were played on radio stations. Together, those metrics helped determine which artists and recordings received nominations.
The older rules also differed from the Grammy Awards in another important way: the AMAs could nominate works even when they were not newly released within a tightly defined eligibility window. That made the process more closely tied to accumulated popularity and market performance.
The rules later expanded. The AMAs incorporated additional indicators such as social-network activity and video viewing, reflecting the way audiences discovered and consumed music in the digital era. “Radio requests” is a tempting distractor because listener demand can influence airplay, but the published description identifies airplay itself as the metric paired with sales. Streaming likewise became relevant only after the earlier sales-and-airplay model.