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The Grammy Museum announced today that on Jan. 25, it will begin offering free general admission for all visitors ages 17 and under. The new policy is expected to more than double the number of youths who visit the museum’s galleries each year.
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The new free-admission policy was made possible by the Stengaard Gross Family Education Initiative through a donation made to the Campaign for Music Education, a fundraising campaign launched in 2022. The Campaign for Music Education has recently surpassed its fundraising goal of $5 million. With this initial milestone now achieved, the Grammy Museum has doubled its fundraising goal to $10 million, which it hopes to reach in 2026.
“The Grammy Museum has always been committed to increase access to music education by reaching underserved communities where access to our museum and programming could make a huge impact,” Michael Sticka, Grammy Museum president and CEO, said in a statement. “Waiving admission for kids 17 and under will go a long way towards achieving that goal.”
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(Sticka, who has been leading the Museum since 2018, just renewed his contract to serve in this role until 2029.)
Additional funds raised through the Campaign for Music Education will expand the museum’s education and community programs, which have served more than 550,000 students through programs such as Grammy Camp, Grammy in the Schools and the Quinn Coleman Scholarship Fund. The Campaign for Music Education is co-chaired by such stars as Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Bruno Mars, Shawn Mendes, and Rosalía.
Additionally, as a result of the Campaign for Music Education, the Museum will unveil Sonic Playground, a new hands-on, permanent exhibit opening next month. Featuring 17 music-making interactives, Sonic Playground allows visitors to play different roles in the music industry, from rapper, singer, and producer to performer, music supervisor, and voice actor, and discover the myriad ways they could pursue a career in the music industry. Sonic Playground is made possible by a donation from Deborah DeBerry Long, dedicated to the legacy of Jim Long.
Additional donors to the Campaign for Music Education include the Ray Charles Foundation, Deborah DeBerry Long, the Living Legacy Foundation, the Natalie Cole Foundation, and BeatHeadz.
The Grammy Museum has announced the expansion of Grammy Camp, a week-long program for high school students interested in pursuing careers in the music industry. Starting in summer 2025, Grammy Camp will be held in New York and Miami, in addition to its flagship Los Angeles program. The 2025 Grammy Camp season will take place […]
Dolly Parton is the 2024 recipient of the PEACE Through Music Award, which honors an American music industry professional, artist or group who has played an invaluable role in cross-cultural exchanges and whose music works to advance peace and mutual understanding globally. The award is presented jointly by the Recording Academy and the U.S. State Department.
Parton, a 10-time Grammy winner who also received a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy in 2011, will be celebrated on Friday (Oct. 25) at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. She will not be in attendance, but sent a video acceptance.
“To say that I was honored to accept the PEACE Through Music Award from the Recording Academy and the U.S. State Department would be putting it mildly,” Parton said. “I was very touched and moved by that. If I have been an inspiration in any way through some act of kindness or through some music that I have written, well, that makes me feel like I have done my job properly. Thanks again for such a great honor.”
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Parton’s commitment to serving others is well-known. Parton’s Imagination Library, which provides underserved children the opportunity to learn through reading, stretches from the hills of Appalachia to the outback of Australia. In addition, she has been a champion of public health, most recently around the COVID-19 vaccine.
“Over the course of her career, Dolly Parton has been committed to enriching communities across the globe, and it’s a privilege to celebrate her dedication to service with the PEACE Through Music Award today,” Harvey Mason jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, said in a statement. “We are grateful to partner with the Department of State on the Global Music Diplomacy Initiative, which represents an important part of the Academy’s work to support music people across the globe.”
“Dolly Parton represents the best of America – her excellence in music, her servant’s heart in giving back to those in need, and her unique ability to always bring people together,” said Lee Satterfield, Acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. “On behalf of the American people and Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken, we are honored to celebrate all of her contributions to people around the world with the PEACE Through Music Award in partnership with the Recording Academy.”
The PEACE Through Music Award is determined through a nomination process, with U.S. embassies around the globe submitting nominations to be considered by a selection committee created jointly by the State Department and Recording Academy. The committee includes Recording Academy members, U.S. Department of State leadership, music industry professionals, and academia. The recommended honorees are approved by the CEO of the Recording Academy, then presented to the Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, who makes the final selection.
The award is part of the Global Music Diplomacy Initiative, which was announced by the Recording Academy and the State Department in 2023. The initiative is designed to elevate music as a global diplomatic platform that promotes peace, expands economic equity, elevates creative economies, ensures societal opportunity, and increases access to education worldwide. The initiative was developed pursuant to the PEACE Through Music Diplomacy Act, which was championed by the Recording Academy and its members in 2022 at its annual Grammys on the Hill and Music Advocacy Day events, resulting in the legislation being passed into law in December 2022.
Tonight’s Grammy Museum event also recognizes the first-ever cohort of the American Music Mentorship Program, which took place in Los Angeles from Oct. 15-25.
Maren Morris is heading back to Grammy Camp. The versatile singer first attended the Grammy Museum‘s program for promising U.S. high school students in 2005 (its first year), when she was 15. She’s returning this year as a guest artist – and, no doubt, a source of inspiration to the assembled students.
“Grammy Camp will always be one of those formative memories in my career,” she said in a statement. “I was 15 years old when I went back in 2005 and remember it cementing my dreams of being a songwriter. Being involved with the organization still to this day is such a unique pleasure I have.”
Morris has had many career highlights since her initial Grammy Camp experience. She won a Grammy in 2017 (best country solo performance for “My Church”) and landed a top five hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2018 with “The Middle,” a collab with Zedd and Grey.
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New York City-born bass guitarist Blu DeTiger and New Jersey-born singer/songwriter Jeremy Zucker will also serve as guest artists this year. All three will discuss their career paths and endeavor to help students prepare for the music industry.
This year’s Grammy Camp will be held from Sunday, July 14 to Saturday July 20 at The Village Recording Studios in Los Angeles. A total of 83 high school students from 76 U.S. cities across 22 states have been selected as participants in the 20th annual Grammy Camp program.
“Over the last two decades, Grammy Camp has served as the heartbeat of the music world for high school students aspiring towards a career in music, offering an authentic immersion into the music industry and life itself,” Michael Sticka, president/CEO of the Grammy Museum, said in a statement.
Grammy Camp will focus on all aspects of commercial music and provide instruction by industry professionals in an immersive and creative environment. The program features seven music career tracks: audio engineering, electronic music production, music business, music and media, songwriting, vocal performance, and instrumental performance. All tracks culminate in virtual media projects, recordings and/or performances.
This Grammy In The Schools program is presented by the Hot Topic Foundation with support from the Chuck Lorre Family Foundation. Additional scholarship and program support is provided by the Aufmann Family, BeatHeadz, Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, Natalie Cole Foundation, Pacific Bridge Arts Foundation, and the Recording Academy.
Applications for GRAMMY Camp 2025 will be available online in September at www.grammycamp.com.
When the Recording Academy put the Grammy Hall of Fame on hiatus for one year, they said they were rethinking the entire process. They weren’t kidding. The first fruits of the retooling will be seen on Tuesday (May 21) when the inaugural Grammy Hall of Fame Induction Gala is held at the Novo Theater at L.A. Live in Los Angeles.
Michael Sticka, president/CEO of the Grammy Museum, says his hope for the induction event is to “build it to ultimately be the Museum’s version of MusiCares’ Person of the Year, to raise money for our programming.”
There are also plans to “build a permanent interactive exhibit to celebrate the Hall of Fame and educate our visitors. That will open early next year.”
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The first five inductions into the Grammy Hall of Fame were announced on the Grammy telecast in March 1974, and the Grammy Museum opened in December 2008, but this is the first time the Museum has partnered with the Recording Academy in a major way to celebrate the Hall of Fame.
“The Hall of Fame and the Museum pretty much go hand-in-hand,” Sticka says. “When we first started talking about what this thing really could be, we talked about how the Hall of Fame should live in the Museum. It makes perfect sense.”
These changes are the result of Sticka’s meeting with Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. and Ruby Marchand, the Academy’s chief awards and industry officer, to brainstorm ways to build the Grammy Hall of Fame into a higher-profile entity. “The whole idea was ‘let’s get away from simply doing a press release,’” Sticka says of the upcoming gala.
They also made several major changes in the way the Grammy HOF operates. In recent decades, 25 or more inductees have been inducted each year. Starting this year, there will be just 10. “We wanted to whittle it down to a manageable number. If we had 25-30 recordings, it’s really hard to properly recognize each of them during an event.”
This year’s 10 new inductees bring the total number of recordings in the Grammy Hall of Fame to 1,162.
There will be live performances to honor six of this year’s honorees at Tuesday’s event, and interstitial video presentations for the other four. R&B singer William Bell will perform his own inducted recording, “You Don’t Miss Your Water.” Andra Day will perform a song from Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, The War and Treaty will sing Charley Pride’s “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” Elle King will perform Wanda Jackson’s “Let’s Have a Party” and Hanson will take on the Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes.”
“We really focused on the tribute performance [format], but William wanted to do [his own song] and we weren’t going to say no to that opportunity,” Sticka says.
This year’s Induction Gala will be produced by Ken Ehrlich, who has amassed nine Primetime Emmy nominations across four decades, along with Chantel Sausedo and Ron Basile. Greg Phillinganes will serve as musical director.
This year’s gala will be filmed but not televised. The plan is to cut together this first induction gala and send it to the Academy’s partners, CBS, which has aired the Grammy telecast every year since 1973, and PBS, which aired the Academy’s Special Merit Awards under the title Grammy Salute to Music Legends for about five years under its Great Performances banner.
“It’s tough to pull off a first-time event,” Sticka says. “There’s no proof-of-concept. [We’re] filming it so we can show what it’s going to look like and show what’s possible and hopefully somebody picks it up in the future to televise.”
Clips from the show will be housed on COLLECTION:live, the Grammy Museum’s streaming site.
A second change in the Grammy Hall of Fame process is that the Academy no longer sets aside a certain number of spots for pre-1950 recordings. The one pre-1950 recording being inducted this year, Kid Ory’s Creole Orchestra’s “Ory’s Creole Trombone” (1922) impressively made the cut without a spot being set aside for very old recordings. Now, the only requirement is that all recordings must be at least 25 years old.
The choices were made by a special member committee of about 20 people who had several Zoom meetings. Sticka says he sat in with the committee but didn’t vote. “There was a lot of conversation around a lot of the recordings,” he reports.
A third change is that the Grammy Hall of Fame will honor a record company each year. Atlantic Records, which was celebrating its 75th anniversary when these discussions got underway, is the first label to be honored. (The label was founded in October 1947 and released its first recordings in January 1948.) Even though the 75th anniversary has passed, it will be honored. 76th anniversary just doesn’t have same ring.
Atlantic doesn’t have any recordings being inducted this year, but it has 38 past Hall of Fame inductions.
As part of the salute to Atlantic, two current Atlantic artists are performing Grammy Hall of Fame classics by legendary Atlantic artists. Shinedown is performing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Ravyn Lenae is singing Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song.” Atlantic had a great deal of input into their segment. “They know themselves best, so we left it up to them,” Sticka says. “We had a lot of conversations with them.”
Starting this year, all artist(s), producer(s), songwriter(s) and engineer(s) who work on a Grammy Hall of Fame inductee will receive a certificate, provided they worked on 51% or more of the recording and had primary participation in those capacities. No statuettes, though. You have to win a Grammy in competition to get one of those.
Ten recordings were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame on Wednesday (March 20), following a two-year period in which the Hall was put on hiatus for a reevaluation. As before, this year’s choices are eclectic and wide-ranging, including several that played a key role in creating or popularizing sub-genres – Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (neo-soul), Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” (EDM) and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (alternative hip-hop).
Several changes were made during the hiatus period. The number of inducted recordings is down significantly from 25 to 30 in prior years. And while past classes have included repeat inductions by such Hall of Fame mainstays as The Beatles and Ella Fitzgerald, all of this year’s choices are by first-time inductees into the Hall.
Also, the inducted recordings will be greeted with more fanfare than in the past, when each class was merely announced via press release. This class will be saluted at the Grammy Museum’s inaugural Grammy Hall of Fame Gala and concert on May 21 at the NOVO Theater in Los Angeles. Significantly, the event was scheduled more than three months after the Feb. 4 Grammys to give it its own moment.
This year’s induction class consists of six singles and four albums. All four albums were the artists’ debut studio albums (or solo debut, in Hill’s case). The three other debut albums honored were Buena Vista Social Club’s eponymous album, Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction and 3 Feet High and Rising. (Remarkably, Hill has not yet released a follow-up studio album, and Buena Vista Social Club disbanded without doing so.)
The inductees vary widely in terms of their commercial success. The list includes two Diamond-certified albums – Appetite for Destruction (18 million) and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (10 million). But it also includes a single, William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” that peaked at a lowly No. 95 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Some of this year’s inducted recordings were showered with Grammy Awards at the time, including Hill’s album of the year winner The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and The Doobie Brothers’ record and song of the year winner “What a Fool Believes.” But many others weren’t even nominated when they were eligible, including Appetite for Destruction and “I Feel Love.”
The Grammy Hall of Fame was created in 1973 to honor recordings that were released prior to the inception of the Grammy Awards in 1958. Eligibility was soon changed to allow any recording released at least 25 years ago. Counting this year’s 10 inductees, it includes 1,152 recordings.
Let’s take a closer look at the 10 recordings being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame this year. The titles are arranged alphabetically by artist.
William Bell, “You Don’t Miss Your Water”
The Ray Charles Foundation has donated $2 million to the Grammy Museum Foundation to fund the museum’s Campaign for Music Education. The Campaign, launched in October 2022, will expand access to the museum’s educational programs, including the Grammy in the Schools programming. Its co-chairs include Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Bruno Mars, Shawn Mendes, and Rosalía. “As the […]
The African American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) and the Grammy Museum are partnering to spotlight the intersectionality between music and content for film, television, and other multimedia platforms. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The year-long collaborative program — which aims to celebrate the fusion of music […]
Olivia Rodrigo celebrated the release of her long-awaited sophomore album Guts on Tuesday night (Oct. 3), when she graced the stage at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles for a brief performance as well as an intimate, in depth conversation with acclaimed songwriter and producer Linda Perry. According to Variety, the 20-year-old superstar performed stripped back, solo […]
The famed Roxy nightclub in West Hollywood turns 50 this month, and it’s celebrating its place in history with a new exhibit at the Grammy Museum.
Much of the exhibit, titled Roxy: 50 and Still Rockin’, draws from the personal archive of Roxy co-founder Lou Adler, 89, who opened the 500-capacity club on the Sunset Strip with Elmer Valentine in 1973. Adler is known as a modern master of both film and song whose introductions are typically preceded by a long list of award-winner accolades, but it was his greatest accomplishment – fathering and raising seven successful sons – that gives the exhibit a unique appeal.
Included in the exhibit — which boasts photos and portraits of Hollywood stars and music legends who frequented the club, including Neil Young, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan — is a short documentary that offers a revealing glimpse inside the Roxy’s first family.
Directed by Ashley Stagg and produced by Grammy Museum chief curator/vp of curatorial affairs Jasen Emmons, the documentary focuses on Adler’s place atop the influential family, which includes Adler’s sons, ages 50 to 21: Nic, Cisco, Sonny, Pablo, Ike, Oscar and Manny.
Lou Adler’s two oldest sons, Nic Adler and Cisco Adler, came of age in The Roxy, the On the Rox private club upstairs and the kitchen of the neighboring Rainbow Bar & Grill, all of which their father co-owned along with most of the rest of the Sunset Strip, including other famous outposts including the Whiskey A-Go-Go, the Comedy Store and the Viper Room.
Nic Adler recalls in the film, “As I have my own kids and they say they want to go somewhere…I’m like, ‘That’s unsafe.’ And then I think back to my own childhood, having free reign between the Rainbow and The Roxy and riding my skateboard in the parking lot. And I think at that point I kind of realized that maybe the way I grew up was different.”
Cisco Adler described the venue as an after-school “rock and roll YMCA” with live music, food and a steady stream of Lakers televised games always available.
“I was a musician playing the club before I was actually in a role other than being an Adler, but I can tell you, I still felt that responsibility,” says Cisco Adler in the film, which notes he first performed on stage in 2000 with his band Whitestarr, and came of age around with Roxy locals like Slash and Tommy Lee and even joined Bret Michaels on stage to sing “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.”
“When you step on that stage, it’s a big moment,” he explained. As for his other siblings involvement, “Ike has become involved in On The Rox and will become more involved as time goes,” Cisco Adler tells Billboard. “Oscar has started handling merchandise. It’s a true family business.”
In the film, Lou Adler says he never “thought about” making The Roxy part of his sons’ lives but that “it was automatic.”
Also featured in the film is promoter and Coachella co-founder Paul Tollett, who has been designated as an honorary Adler by the family for the years he spent at the venue as a fan, and later as a promoter bringing concerts to the venue. He’s now viewed as the keeper of the flame, managing the venue on behalf of the Adlers through his L.A. concert company, Goldenvoice.
In the film, Tollett recalls seeing Lou pull up to The Roxy in an Aston Martin Lagonda with one of his kids in the backseat — on a school night — and thinking to himself, “What a cool dad.”
The Roxy is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a series of anniversary shows, including two Neil Young concerts set for Wednesday (Sept. 20) and Thursday (Sept. 21) in honor of Young’s concerts that opened the venue in 1973. Additionally, Stephen Marley will perform on Monday (Sept. 25) in honor of Bob Marley and the Wailers‘ historic 1976 performance at The Roxy, which aired live on KMET radio and was released as a live album in 2023. More information can be found at theroxyturns50.com.
The City of West Hollywood is also hosting an exhibit on the history of the Roxy at the West Hollywood Library in conjunction with the Grammy Museum. Click here for more information.