The Grammys should be decided by ‘relevant music people,’ says Recording Academy CEO

LOS ANGELES — Two-thirds of the professional musicians who will decide the results of next year’s Grammy Awards weren’t members of the Recording Academy as recently as 2018.

That’s one of the key findings of a report the academy released Thursday, one day before the start of first-round Grammy voting, during which the organization’s roughly 13,000 voting members will determine nominations for the music industry’s most prestigious prize. Nominations for the 67th Grammys will be announced Nov. 8; the ceremony itself will be held Feb. 2 at Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles.

The turnover in the academy’s electorate is significant given the criticism the group has faced for years that its voters are too old, too male and too white to properly recognize excellence in modern popular music. According to the report, the share of academy members who identify as people of color has increased 65% since 2019 while the percentage of women has grown 27%.

In 2019 — a year before the academy ousted its first female chief executive, Deborah Dugan, amid an explosive scandal involving charges of discrimination and vote-rigging behind the scenes at the Grammys — the academy said it intended to add 2,500 female members by 2025. The new report says it’s added more than 3,000 women a year ahead of schedule.

“What we’re doing is we’re looking at the membership that we have, and we’re comparing that to what’s going on in our music community — who’s making the music, what’s their gender, what’s their age, what’s their ethnicity,” Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. said in an interview. “And then we’re trying to make sure that our membership is representative of that.”

In its public messaging, the academy has long emphasized the idea that a Grammy is the preeminent music award because it’s bestowed by an artist’s peers (as opposed to an American Music Award, a Billboard Music Award or an MTV Video Music Award, which are determined by fan votes or chart statistics). Yet the electorate’s perceived older-white-man contingent has been widely blamed for conspicuous losses in recent years by acts, including Beyoncé and the Weeknd, who represent the music industry’s creative power centers.

Mason said the academy has been “very strategic” since he assumed his role in 2019 in conducting outreach to communities that traditionally have been underrepresented in the organization. In 2024, 72% of those invited to join the academy accepted the offer, the organization says, resulting in an all-time high of more than 2,800 new members. Of the new recruits, 45% said they were below the age of 40, according to the academy.

In addition to enlisting new members, the academy has shed Grammy voters that no longer meet the organization’s qualifications for membership — “voters that maybe had a hit record or a song published in the ‘70s or ‘80s and just kept voting,” as Mason put it. The group’s goal, he said, is an electorate composed of “relevant music people.”

Asked whether some of those deemed irrelevant protested their expulsion, Mason laughed. “There were some cases, of course, where people wanted to continue to be members,” he said. “But we really felt strongly that making sure everyone was requalified” — meaning a voter could submit recording credits from within the last five years — “would have an impact on the outcomes of our elections.”

Added Mason: “We can celebrate the stats. But my hope is we can celebrate the results — better nominations, better wins, more reflective of what’s happening in music.”

To that end, Mason sent a letter to voters in July imploring them to put in the work of listening to eligible recordings and judging them “with pride and with purpose.” Many younger members have complained about the academy’s cumbersome voting process, which Mason said the group has tried to improve with an app it soft-launched last year and is more heavily promoting this time around.

“But it’s not supposed to be easy,” he cautioned of the process. “It’s not supposed to be something you just do casually while you’re watching TV.” The academy received more than 20,000 entries for the 2025 Grammys, he added, which must be winnowed down to just five to eight nominees in each category for the final round of voting, which is set to run from Dec. 12 to Jan. 3.

“My hope is we can be very intentional in our voting,” he said.

As he looks toward next year’s ceremony, does Mason remember the public scolding the academy received from Jay-Z at February’s show, where the veteran rapper said he couldn’t understand why his wife, Beyoncé, had never won the Grammy for album of the year.

“Oh, I remember it,” Mason said. “Initially, to be honest, I was a little bummed, because I always want the artist community — especially artists that have a platform like that — to understand and appreciate the progress. And I felt like, ‘Dang, he didn’t understand what’s happened so far. Maybe he doesn’t have enough information. How can I share with him the things I’m passionate about that have changed in the organization?’

“But that quickly faded, and I realized that the Grammy is important to him. It’s important to the people that he was speaking of. And it gave me hope to remember that this is such an aspirational award, and that it really, really matters. And I will say: Since then, I’ve had a chance to share more information, and I hope to continue to be able to do that.”

Did he find that Jay-Z was open to such info?

“I won’t even comment on that,” Mason replied. “But I just took it as an opportunity to learn from him and share information.”