1. Taylor Swift and the 2010 Grammy Awards

Taylor Swift, 20 wins four awards including Album of the Year for Fearless at the Grammy Awards 2010 on January 31. The singer also took awards for Best Country Album (also Fearless), Best Country Song and Best Female Country Vocal Performance (White Horse.)

2. Her Performance

Swift's performance at the Awards sparks criticism that she was out of tune. Watch it below:

3. The critics

The week following the Grammys, music critics start to comment on Swift's performance.

The last thing I want to do is ruin another awards ceremony for Taylor Swift. But there’s no doubt that someone was badly off-key.. And I’m afraid my money’s on Taylor, wrote Entertainment Weekly.

Her [Swift] singing was painfully out of tune, Jon Pareles from the NYTimes said.

To borrow a phrase from Montgomery Burns, it was more 'off-key caterwauling, wrote the Washington Post.

“Tinny and rhythmically flat footed,” Ann Powers of The Los Angeles Times said.

4. The Defense

Scott Borchetta, president and CEO of Big Machine Records, Swift's record label, backed the singer's performance. “Maybe she’s not the best technical singer, but she is the best emotional singer because everybody else who gets up there and is technically perfect, people don’t seem to want more of it,” Borchetta told The Tennessean.com. “No one is perfect on any given day. Maybe in that moment, we didn’t have the best night, but in the same breath, maybe we did.”

He also told the Associated Press: This is not American Idol. This is not a competition of getting up and seeing who can sing the highest note. This is about a true artist and writer and communicator.

Borchetta also noted that there was a technical problem during Swift's performance with Nicks and that the singer was unable to hear the complete mix of the song as she performed it, AP reported.

5. The Response

Singer Kelly Clarkson, a former winner of American Idol, wrote a letter to address Borchetta and basically said she disagreed he had attacked American Idol.

We not only hit the high notes, you forgot to mention we generally hit the 'right' notes as well, she wrote.