Grammys
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Six female solo artists and an all-female group account for all but one of the 2024 Grammy nominations for album of the year. Only Jon Batiste’s World Music Radio kept male artists from being shut out in the top category this year. This is the 12th time that female artists have dominated the album of […]
Six days after announcing Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo as the first performers set for the 2024 Grammy Awards, CBS announced three more performers: Travis Scott, Luke Combs and Burna Boy. These bookings bring gender, genre and racial diversity to Music’s Biggest Night.
The announcement was made during the fourth quarter of Sunday’s NFL football game (Kansas City vs. Buffalo), just as last week’s performer announcement was made during the fourth quarter of the AFC wild-card game. Both games were broadcast on CBS, which has aired the Grammys since 1973.
All three of the newly-added performers are current Grammy nominees. Scott is nominated for best rap album for Utopia. He was also nominated in that category for his previous studio album, Astroworld. Scott has amassed 10 nominations. He has yet to win.
Combs is nominated for best country solo performance for his version of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” Chapman performed the song as the final performance of the night on the Grammy telecast in February 1989, so there may be reason to hope the Grammys can land a collaborative performance on this year’s show. This is Combs’ seventh nomination. He too has yet to win. He was nominated for best new artist five years ago, but lost to Lipa. (Both artists have done exceptionally well in the ensuing five years.)
Burna Boy is nominated in four categories – best global music album (I Told Them…), best African music performance (“City Boys”), best global music performance (“Alone”), and best melodic rap performance (“Sittin’ on Top of the World”). He won best global music album three years ago for Twice as Tall.
Additional performers will be announced in the two weeks leading up to the Feb. 4 ceremony.
Trevor Noah will host the Grammys for the fourth consecutive year. He too is a Grammy nominee. He is up for best comedy album for I Wish You Would. He’s the first Grammy host to be nominated for a Grammy that same year since Queen Latifah in 2005. Noah won a Primetime Emmy last week for outstanding talk series for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
The 66th annual Grammy Awards will be held on Sunday, Feb. 4 from 8:00-11:30 p.m. live ET/5:00-8:30 p.m. live PT on CBS and will stream live and on-demand on Paramount+ (live and on demand for Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers, or on demand for Paramount+ Essential subscribers the day after the special airs).
The telecast will be produced by Fulwell 73 Productions for the Recording Academy for the fourth consecutive year. Ben Winston, Raj Kapoor and Jesse Collins are executive producers.
Spotify‘s annual best new artist party is returning for Grammy Week 2024.
On Thursday, Feb. 1, the streamer will showcase live performances from Grammys best new artist nominees Noah Kahan, Gracie Abrams, Victoria Monet and Jelly Roll, among others, at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. The event kicks off at 7 p.m.
“2024 marks eight years since launching Spotify’s Best New Artist campaign and seven years that we have hosted the party to honor the nominees,” says Jeremy Erlich, Spotify’s global head of music, in a statement. “Our mission is to support new artists and artist development, and BNA is a moment to honor the best of the best. It’s been incredible to celebrate with the artists and their teams and see this event grow to what it has become today.”
“Our team has been working for months to bring this event to life,” added Joe Hadley, Spotify’s global head of music partnerships & audience. “Not only do we get to celebrate the artists, but we also get to lift up our partners on the labels, publishers, management and industry teams who we work with day in and day out. Spotify prides itself on being the premiere partner for artists of all stages and their teams. It’s a privilege to not only showcase the incredible art being made but also bring opportunities to artists that help propel careers to the next level.”
The year’s other best new artist nominees are Fred again.., Ice Spice, Coco Jones and The War and Treaty.
Spotify first hosted its best new artist Grammy party in 2017, when it showcased performances by two nominees: The Chainsmokers and Maren Morris. Last year, the party featured performances from all 10 best new artist nominees — Anitta, Omar Apollo, Domi & JD Beck, Muni Long, Latto, Måneskin, Tobe Nwigwe, Molly Tuttle, Wet Leg and eventual winner Samara Joy — at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.
Lainey Wilson’s Bell Bottom Blues has been an awards magnet in the past year. The collection won album of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards on May 11 and at the Country Music Awards on Nov. 8. On Feb. 4, we’ll find out if it becomes the eighth album to complete country […]
The 66th annual Grammy Awards are almost here, and before Music’s Biggest Night takes over the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Sunday (Feb. 4), this year’s top talent, nominees and more will be spending the week celebrating their achievements at countless parties and events. SZA leads this year’s pack of nominees with nine nods — including […]
Diddy will not be attending the 2024 Grammy Awards on Feb. 4, despite his nomination for best progressive R&B album for his The Love Album: Off the Grid, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The news comes amid a series of sexual assault accusations against the musician and entrepreneur. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news […]
The Grammy Awards have had genre-specific categories from the very start, but the line-up looks a lot different today than when the first Grammys were presented in May 1959.
Back then, when there were 28 categories, there were six categories reserved for classical music, two for jazz and one each for country & western and rhythm & blues.
That meant some records were shoehorned into categories where they didn’t quite fit. Because there was no category for folk, The Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” wound up winning best country & western performance. Because there was no category for rock and roll, The Champs’ “Tequila” won best rhythm & blues performance.
That first year, there were also no categories specifically earmarked for eventual staple Grammy genres like pop (though the awards for best vocal performance, male and female tended to go to pop artists), dance music (unless you count best performance by a dance band, won by Count Basie), blues, gospel or Latin — or such later-emerging genres as rock, metal, alternative, rap, Americana, Contemporary Christian or Global.
The addition of these and other categories has made the number of categories swell to 94 by the time of the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, which will be presented on Feb. 4. That’s more than three times as many as at the first Grammy ceremony, but down from the all-time high of 110 categories that were presented in 2008 and 2009.
There was a major streamlining in 2012, when the number of categories plummeted from 109 to 78. In a recent interview with Billboard, Academy CEO Harvey Mason, jr. referred to it as “the great consolidation.” Two factors were responsible for the reduction: Many felt that the glut of categories devalued the award. Also, The Grammys opted for gender-neutral categories, which reduced the number of categories needed.
Ahead of this year’s ceremony, we put together a guide to the history of 20 genres that are recognized on the big night, listed in the order they were first introduced on the Grammy ballot. We also rounded up some of the discontinued Grammy categories that have been lost to time.
This story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
A few notes first: many categories have had name changes over the years. At the Grammy Awards presented in 1969, country & western was shortened to country; rhythm & blues was abbreviated R&B. More recently, best urban contemporary album was renamed best progressive R&B album because some took umbrage at the term “urban.” Best world music album was renamed best global music album to get away from “connotations of colonialism, folk, and ‘non-American’ that the former term embodied,” according to an Academy statement. Best rap/sung collaboration became best rap/sung performance (it no longer had to be a collaboration); it is now best melodic rap performance.
Some category names were changed because they were just too unwieldly. Best soundtrack album or recording of original cast from a motion picture or television, as the category was known in 1961-62, is now known by the much simpler best score soundtrack for visual media. Even when the original names weren’t that clunky, the new shorter versions are catchier, as when best long-form music video became best music film and best short-form music video became best music video.
Read on for a brief, selective history of genre at the Grammys – the years shown are the years of the award presentations each genre first appeared.
Rock (1962)
On Wednesday, Jan. 31, the Recording Academy’s Producers & Engineers Wing will come together with its Songwriters & Composers Wing at the Grammy Museum in downtown L.A. to host “A Celebration of Craft.” The event will honor Leslie Ann Jones, a seven-time Grammy winner and the first woman chair of the Recording Academy’s board of trustees (1999-2001), who has been a top recording and mixing engineer and record producer for more than four decades.
The celebration — a first joint Grammy Week event for the Academy’s craft wings — will kick off the Academy’s official events in the lead-up to the 66th annual Grammy Awards.
The event will also shine a light on this year’s nominees for songwriter of the year, non-classical.
“I’m so excited for our Producers & Engineers and Songwriters & Composers Wings to come together for A Celebration of Craft later this month,” Harvey Mason jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, said in a statement. “I look forward to joining with music people from both of these communities to kick off our Grammy Week celebrations.”
Maureen Droney, vp of the Producers & Engineers Wing, added in a statement: “From her decades-spanning recording career to her work as former chair of the Recording Academy’s board of trustees, a co-chair of the P&E Wing, and much more, Leslie Ann Jones has always been committed to the music community and to excellence in recording.”
In her statement, Susan Stewart, MD of the Songwriters & Composers Wing, said: “A Celebration of Craft will mark the first Grammy Week event for the Songwriters & Composers Wing since our Wing was founded in 2021, and we could not be more enthusiastic to come together with our community for an evening dedicated to celebrating their creativity.”
Jones has held staff positions at ABC Recording Studios in Los Angeles, the Automatt Recording Studios in San Francisco, Capitol Studios in Hollywood, and now Skywalker Sound, where she records and mixes music for records, films, video games and TV and produces records, primarily in the classical genre.
Jones, the daughter of famed comedy recording star Spike Jones, serves on the advisory board of Institute for the Musical Arts and on the board of directors of the Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G.). She is also an artistic advisor to the Technology and Applied Composition degree program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Jones was inducted into the NAMM TEC Hall of Fame in 2019 and was the recipient of the 2022 G.A.N.G. Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also a member of the Library of Congress’ National Recording Preservation Board.
Grammy Week culminates with the 66th annual Grammy Awards at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena on Sunday, Feb. 4. The ceremony will be broadcast live on CBS and stream live and on-demand on Paramount+ at 8-11:30 p.m. ET/5-8:30 p.m. PT.
The 2024 Grammys are coming up on Feb. 4, but the Recording Academy is already looking ahead to the 2025 awards. The Academy announced today that the eligibility period for the 67th annual Grammy Awards will be Sept. 16, 2023 through Aug. 30, 2024.
“This timeline gives us the time to thoroughly process all entries and uphold the integrity of the awards process,” the Academy’s awards team noted in an email to voting members. “It also improves the Online Entry Process [OEP] by aligning the end of the eligibility period with the end of our OEP period.”
You may recall that the Academy announced on March 1, 2023 that they were advancing the close of the eligibility year to Aug. 31 last year, but relented five weeks later amid criticism that this was insufficient notice for such a major change. Instead, they split the difference and advanced the close of the eligibility year to Sept. 15, 2023.
Harvey Mason Jr., the Academy’s CEO, announced that middle-ground compromise in a message to members on April 6, 2023, which shed light on the reasons the Academy is pushing for an earlier close: “A few weeks ago, we communicated a change to the eligibility period for the 66th Grammy Awards. This change benefits our awards process and grants us flexibility throughout Grammy season – specifically related to our nominations announcement timeline and the booking of the Grammy telecast, Premiere Ceremony, Recording Academy Honors Presented by the Black Music Collective, and other important celebrations throughout Grammy Week.
“After listening to concerns from some members of the music community, we have decided to amend the end date of the previously-announced eligibility period. The eligibility deadline for the 66th Annual Grammy Awards will be extended by two weeks, to Friday, Sept. 15, 2023.
“We care about the impact of this date change on our community and make this adjustment in the spirit of partnership and collaboration.”
The Academy made the announcement of the earlier closing nearly two months earlier this year than it did last year to give artists and their labels more time to plan around it.
The Grammy eligibility year extended from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30 every year for decades – from the 20th annual Grammy Awards (which covered the period from Oct. 1, 1976, through Sept. 30, 1977) through the 51st annual Grammy Awards (Oct. 1, 2007, through Sept. 30, 2008).
The schedule has been more irregular since then. Here are the outliers:
52nd annual Grammy Awards: Oct. 1, 2008 through Aug. 31, 2009 (11 months)
53rd annual Grammy Awards: Sept. 1, 2009 through Sept. 30, 2010 (13 months)
62nd annual Grammy Awards: Oct. 1, 2018 through Aug. 31, 2019 (11 months)
63rd annual Grammy Awards: Sept. 1, 2019 through Aug. 31, 2020 (12 months)
64th annual Grammy Awards: Sept. 1, 2020 through Sept. 30, 2021 (13 months)
66th annual Grammy Awards: Oct. 1, 2020 through Sept. 15, 2023 (11-1/2 months)
67th annual Grammy Awards: Sept. 16, 2023 through Aug. 30, 2024 (11-1/2 months)
Laurie Anderson, The Clark Sisters, Gladys Knight, N.W.A, Donna Summer and Tammy Wynette are the Recording Academy’s 2024 lifetime achievement award honorees. Also announced on Friday (Jan. 5), Peter Asher, DJ Kool Herc and Joel Katz are trustees award recipients; Tom Kobayashi and Tom Scott are technical Grammy award honorees; and “Refugee,” written by K’naan, […]