Grammy Awards

• 1. Introduction

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  The Grammy Awards were born not from a love of music, but from a real estate project. In the late 1950s, recording executives sitting on the Hollywood Walk of Fame committee drew up a list of music industry figures who might qualify for a star on Hollywood Boulevard. The conclusion they reached was uncomfortable: many of the most significant people in their business would never earn one. So they decided to build something of their own, modeled on the Oscars and the Emmys. They even debated calling it the "Eddie", in tribute to Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph. The name they eventually chose came through a mail-in contest, with the earliest winning postmark belonging to Jay Danna of New Orleans, Louisiana, who submitted "Grammy" as an abbreviated nod to Emile Berliner's invention, the gramophone. On the 4th of May, 1959, the first ceremony was held simultaneously in Beverly Hills, California, and New York City, awarding 28 trophies. What would follow over the next six-and-a-half decades is a story of prestige, controversy, shifting power, and an institution perpetually arguing with itself about what music is for.

• 2. The Trophy Itself

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  Every Grammy trophy is a gold-plated gramophone, made by hand at Billings Artworks in Ridgway, Colorado. In 1990, the original design was reworked. The traditional soft lead was swapped for a stronger alloy less prone to damage, and the trophy was made bigger. Billings then developed a proprietary zinc alloy they trademarked under the name Grammium. The trophies engraved with each recipient's name are not ready until after the winners are announced, so the ceremony relies on re-used "stunt" trophies during the broadcast itself. By February 2009, some 7,578 Grammy trophies had been awarded. The trophy is so central to the awards' identity that the original working name for the ceremony was simply the "Gramophone Awards".

• 3. The Architecture of Winning

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  Four awards sit at the center of the Grammy universe, belonging to no single genre. Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist together make up what is known as the General Field. Only three artists in Grammy history have won all four. Christopher Cross swept them in 1981. Billie Eilish swept them in 2020, at age 18, becoming the youngest artist ever to accomplish the feat. Adele collected hers across three separate ceremonies: Best New Artist in 2009, and her remaining three in 2012 and 2017. Since 2024, the General Field expanded to six awards, absorbing the Producer of the Year, Non-Classical and Songwriter of the Year, Non-Classical categories. Most trophies, however, never reach the main telecast. With close to 95 categories at the 68th ceremony in 2026, only roughly ten to twelve awards are presented on the live broadcast. The rest are handed out in a pre-telecast Premiere Ceremony held the same afternoon. Voting is handled by members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, each of whom may cast ten votes across genre fields. Final tallies are tabulated in secret by the accounting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

• 4. The Hall and the Map

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  Before 1971, the Grammy ceremony had no fixed home. New York City and Los Angeles shared hosting duties, with Chicago joining in 1962 and Nashville added as a fourth location in 1965. The 1971 ceremony at the Hollywood Palladium was the first to occur in a single location and the first to air live on television. The year before that, a filmed special called The Best on Record had been running on NBC throughout the 1960s. Pierre Cossette, a television producer, bought the broadcast rights from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and organized that first live telecast. CBS acquired rights in 1973 after the ceremony moved to Nashville, an event that had a direct consequence: Dick Clark created the American Music Awards for ABC in response. Since 2000, the ceremony has been anchored at what is now called Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, with only three exceptions. The Grammy Museum was later built directly across the street, with bronze disks embedded in the surrounding sidewalks to honor each year's top winners in the Record, Album, Song, and Best New Artist categories. For the 2027 ceremony, the Grammys will broadcast on ABC for the first time since 1972, under a ten-year deal with the Walt Disney Company announced on the 30th of October, 2024.

• 5. The Latin Branch

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  By 1989, Latin music in Spanish and Portuguese had grown too large to fold comfortably into the main Grammy ceremony. The Recording Academy began discussing a separate recognition track, and by 1997 had established the Latin Recording Academy as its own institution. The Latin Grammy Awards launched in 2000. The scope is deliberately global: works recorded in Spanish or Portuguese are eligible regardless of where the artist is from, provided the recording has been released in Ibero-America, the Iberian Peninsula, or the United States. The Latin Grammys operate independently of the main ceremony but share the same foundational model.

• 6. The Commercialism Critique

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  When Pearl Jam won Best Hard Rock Performance in 1996, lead singer Eddie Vedder walked to the microphone and said, "I don't know what this means. I don't think it means anything." In 2008, Glen Hansard, leader of Irish rock group the Frames, described the Grammys as something outside the real world of music, "that's fully industry based". Maynard James Keenan of progressive rock band Tool skipped the ceremony after a win and explained his absence plainly: "I think the Grammys are nothing more than some gigantic promotional machine for the music industry. They cater to a low intellect and they feed the masses. They don't honor the arts or the artist for what he created. It's the music business celebrating itself." In 1991, Sinead O'Connor became the first musician to refuse a Grammy outright, boycotting the ceremony over what she called its extreme commercialism. She had been nominated for Record of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and Best Alternative Music Performance. She went on to win the Alternative Music award despite not attending. In 2024, Rhiannon Giddens put a sharper economic edge on the criticism by describing the financial strain the ceremony places on working musicians, pointing specifically to a policy of charging nominees $1,200 to bring a companion. A Billboard article noted that the actual scale was a tiered system running from $375 to $2,000 per ticket to the pre-telecast ceremony.

• 7. Snubs, Omissions, Power

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  Following the 37th Grammy Awards, the Recording Academy established anonymous nomination review committees, a direct response to that year's Album of the Year field, which included Tony Bennett's live MTV Unplugged album and competitors from Seal, Bonnie Raitt, and Eric Clapton, while leaving out Nas's debut album Illmatic, Oasis's Definitely Maybe, Hole's Live Through This, Jeff Buckley's Grace, and the debut from Wu-Tang Clan. Those committees were disbanded in 2021, itself a response to criticism that the Weeknd's album After Hours received zero nominations at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards. The Weeknd, whose legal name is Abel Tesfaye, called the process "corrupt" on social media. Harvey Mason, Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, responded publicly and acknowledged that Tesfaye's music that year had been "excellent". The 2020 exclusion of Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy from Album of the Year nominations generated criticism from two separate New York Times journalists. Randall Roberts described West's album as "the most critically acclaimed album of the year, a career-defining record". Jon Caramanica wrote that the Recording Academy had gone "for the umpteenth time" with "familiarity over risk". West did not attend the ceremony. Recording Academy CEO Deborah Dugan was placed on administrative leave on the 16th of January, 2020, after a complaint of bullying from a staff member, ten days before that year's ceremony. Dugan had herself filed an internal complaint alleging voting conflicts of interest, claiming that one artist who initially ranked 18th out of 20 in the Song of the Year category for the 61st Annual Grammy Awards ultimately received a nomination.

• 8. Women and the Institution

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  At the 60th Annual Grammy Awards in 2018, New Zealand singer Lorde turned down an offer to perform at the ceremony after being refused a solo slot, despite her Album of the Year nomination. She alleged that each male nominee was offered a solo performance. Her mother Sonja Yelich noted that only nine percent of nominees across the previous six Grammy ceremonies had been women. That ceremony concluded with Best Pop Solo Performance going to Ed Sheeran in a category with four female nominees. Recording Academy president Neil Portnow then told an interviewer that female artists needed to "step up" to win awards. The comment drew public criticism from Pink, Katy Perry, Vanessa Carlton, Sheryl Crow, Iggy Azalea, Halsey, and Charli XCX, and sparked the hashtag GrammysSoMale on social media. The following year, singer Ariana Grande withdrew from performing after producers declined to let her perform her then-current single "7 Rings" without conditions she called unacceptable. She later said in a public statement that producer Ken Ehrlich had lied about her reasons for withdrawing: "I can pull together a performance over night and you know that, Ken; it was when my creativity and self expression was stifled by you, that I decided not to attend." By the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, the trajectory had shifted: all four of the major awards went to women, and several female artists broke records at that ceremony. Beyoncé, with 35 Grammy Awards, holds the record for most wins by any artist in the award's history.