Coldplay are a British alternative rock band formed in 1996. They achieved worldwide fame with the release of the single "Yellow" in 2000, followed by their debut album released in the same year, Parachutes, which was nominated for the Mercury Prize. The band's second album, A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002), was released to very favourable reviews and won multiple awards, including NME's Album of the Year, and has been widely considered the best of the Nelson-produced Coldplay albums. The band has won a number of music awards throughout their career, including six Brit Awards—winning Best British Group three times, four MTV Video Music Awards, and seven Grammy Awards from twenty nominations. As one of the world's best-selling music artists, Coldplay have sold over 50 million records worldwide.

Neil Diamond is an American singer-songwriter with a career spanning over five decades from the 1960s until the present. As of 2001, Diamond had sold over 115 million records worldwide including 48 million in the United States alone. He is considered to be the third most successful adult contemporary artist ever on the Billboard chart behind Barbra Streisand and Elton John. Diamond was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. Additionally, he received the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000 and in 2011 was an honoree at the Kennedy Center Honors