Inside how the Grammy Awards have changed, from voting | Music News

The first Grammy Awards ceremony was held on May 4, 1959, and since then, a number of major adjustments have been applied, spanning voting and classes.

Ahead of the 68th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, February 1, airing live from Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena on CBS and Paramount+, it is price trying at how music‘s largest night time has developed over the a long time. It may really feel like business as typical, but some of the largest adjustments go unnoticed.

Reflecting on the annual awards ceremony’s historical past, a number of music industry consultants have agreed that the Grammys are now less about rewarding consensus winners and more about a balancing act of inclusion, relevance, and industry politics.

David Hampian, Managing Director at Field Vision, has spent 15 years as a music industry government, main advertising at firms such as Pandora, Twitch, and Amazon Music.

He’s labored instantly with music followers and artists to scale cultural moments and has now told Daily Express US, “Today, the Grammys is less about crowning consensus winners and more about balancing inclusion, relevance, and industry politics.”

He added, “In that sense, it has shifted from being a cultural authority to more of a ‘negotiated’ one.”

Meanwhile, Tracy Lamourie, Founder and Managing Director at Lamourie Media, agreed. The internationally recognized celeb publicist, business strategist, and media commentator told us, “I really think we’ve seen them move away from being a pure voting, elite insider consensus into more of reflecting public behavior.

“It’s trying more at streaming realities and the cultural affect that a specific artist has had. So it’s gone past just the music, for sure.”

The Grammy Awards’ categories have their own issues, too, according to Hampian, who added, “Expanding classes has been good because it displays how fragmented and global music tradition now is. However, it has also diluted issues.

“The categories have multiplied faster than our shared cultural understanding, which makes the show feel somewhat like an ‘industry census’ than a cultural moment.”

Lamourie added, “In terms of reshuffling the categories and the genre impact, yes, the lines have blurred, so we don’t have the same kind of clear, old, rigid categories. And there’s kind of a lack of clarity there now. So the upside is there are more places, more ways for different artists to be represented, but there also seems to be less understanding now of what specific thing the Grammys are actually rewarding. So that’s an interesting development.”

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Hampian also talked about internet hosting as a major change for the Grammy Awards. He said, “Hosting has followed this same arc. Hosts matter less as personalities and more as connective tissue between moments designed to travel on social the next day.”

Lamourie said that internet hosting the awards show has change into an “increasingly difficult job.”

She explained, “You don’t just have to be an entertainer. You’re not just looking for somebody who can move the crowd along or move the event along quickly. You want somebody who’s going to become a cultural traffic controller, basically.

“What I imply by that is that they keep the show transferring, but they’re not going to trigger an accident. They’re not going to trigger a crash. They’re not going to change into the story or the headline the next day because they said one thing mistaken.”

Lamourie said the biggest change at the Grammys is that it is no longer just about music. It “encompasses all the things” and is about “generations” and “who has energy in the industry.”

The expert added, “It’s about politics. It’s about id. It’s about the cultural second. So all those issues add relevance to the Grammys and make them more important in some methods, but it also makes them less real, more scrutinized, and a little less trusted.

“So again, what’s improved is more genre recognition, which I think is really good. There’s obviously a willingness to change, to move forward, to modernize, rather than just freeze because it’s the way it’s always been done. We’re seeing more space for global artists and more attention on non-traditional artists.”

However, Lamourie said there’s less “public trust in the voting process,” and “we’ve lost that sense that a Grammy is the definitive arbitrator of excellence. That’s not necessarily the case anymore. So I think viewers aren’t necessarily watching to see who’s the best or who the winner is.”

Lamourie concluded, “They’re watching for moments, to see what happens, what someone might say, what someone might do, that glance, that insider look. So the way I would put it is the Grammys used to crown the winners, but now they’re more about arbitrating the culture. A Grammy today is less the verdict and more being part of the conversation.”

Hampian agreed, saying the “real story” is that the Grammys are “no longer competing with other awards shows. They are competing with streaming data, fandoms, and the internet’s ability to validate artists and cultural trends in real time.”

He completed by saying, ‘That pressure is shaping all the things from classes to pacing to who the show is absolutely for.”