Big Changes Coming To The Grammys

The Recording Academy has announced a slew of big changes to the Grammy awards. They have consolidated dozens of awards categories, changed eligibility requirements and even changed how voting works.

The changes will be felt right away. For the 54th annual Grammy Awards next year there will only be 78 categories, 31 less than there were this year. It sounds like the most noticeable change will be the eliminating of the gender differences in categories like Pop, R&B, rock and country. So there will no longer be a best male pop performance, and a best female pop performance, just a best pop performance.

"Every year there are changes but we've never … stopped and stepped back to look at the whole thing," Portnow told Billboard in an exclusive interview. "[We asked], is there an underlying infrastructure and rationale across all the awards as to how we're doing this? And what we found is, there wasn't.”

You can see more of the changes and read the whole story and from Billboard.

I for one am all for the changes. It seems to me that the Grammys have become a joke to most people outside of the music industry. This year they handed out 109 Grammy awards.  109! think winning the “best collaboration with a female pop artist appearing on a smooth-jazz album featuring at least 6 woodwinds” Grammy award has lost its luster.

Keep witling down the awards categories and make them Grammy’s a relevant competition again. I only wish there was a way for the Grammy folks to somehow make more of a distinction between "good" music and "popular" music when they hand out awards.