Every year, the best and brightest from the past year in music hope to hear their names called when the GRAMMY
winners are announced. But how are those winners determined, and who decides who’s even nominated?
This is Billboard Explains: How GRAMMY Nominees and Winners are Chosen. The GRAMMY Awards are peer
recognized by more than 13,000 Recording Academy members who are music creators and professionals.
New member submissions into the Recording Academy requires two recommendations from industry peers.
The peer review panel is made up of Recording Academy trustees that are also voting members of
the Recording Academy. It is your fellow peers who are deciding who gets invited to the Recording
Academy each year. In 2020, the Academy invited over 2,300 new voting and non-voting members
The move that helped achieve gender parody, with 48% female and 48% male. The incoming class
was also made up of 37% people of color, making this past year their most diverse ever.
“We’re taking big steps, bold steps to make sure we are the most representative
representative organization that we can be and hopefully in music.” But not everyone gets the privilege to vote.
To become a Voting member and have a voice in the nominees and winners, a member must carry technical
credits on released tracks. Nominations for the 80+ categories are determined by thousands
of entries. Submissions must be released during a particular window each year to be eligible.
All the submissions are verified for eligibility and move onto genre-based selection committees
that collaborate to ensure those entries are placed in the appropriate category.
After submissions are categorized properly, those ballots are released to the thousands of voting
members for their choice on who the nominees will be. Voting members can vote in up to 15
categories in which they have expertise – as well as in each of the all-genre “Big Four” categories,
Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Album of the Year and Best New Artist. Votes are tabulated by
the accounting firm Deloitte, and the results are sent to the Recording Academy’s nomination review
committees. These committees discuss the top 15 vote-getters or 20 in the “Big Four” categories
from the first round of ballots and decide the final nominations themselves. "The theory
is that they spend a day or two listening to everything and they’re going to be
more objective. They're going to be less swayed by sentimentality, by name
power of the artist." Then it is on to voting. After the nominations are settled,
another round of ballots are drawn up for Recording Academy voting members.
Once those votes are cast, they are again tabulated by Deloitte. The Recording Academy
finds out the results along with the rest of us -- when the winners are revealed on GRAMMY night.