Recording Academy President/CEO, Neil Portnow in a statement to Billboard, has announced some changes that will take effect in four of the major categories of the annual Grammy awards. The Album, Record, Song and New Artist of the year categories will from next year, which will be the 61st Grammy awards will contain 8 nominees in each of the above mentioned categories as against the usual 5 nominees.
As to why these changes are been made, Neil explained that the change will help give more flexibility to their voters and also helps create more space for recognition.
“Throughout the year, we team up with music people across all genres and disciplines to consider revisions and subsequently make amendments to our rules and entry guidelines to ensure we’re keeping up with our ever-changing industry and meeting the needs of music creators. This creates more opportunities for a wide-range of recognition in these important categories and gives more flexibility to our voters when having to make the often challenging decision about representing excellence and the best in music for the year. We look forward to celebrating all our nominees when they are announced later this year”.
Among the other changes, music supervisors will now be considered nominees in the best compilation soundtrack album and restoration engineers will now be eligible for best historical album. In the best song written for visual media category, if a track is released in the current eligibility year (October 1- September 31), but the soundtrack album is not released until the following eligibility year, the track will be eligible for Grammy consideration in the following year so long as it is not submitted in any category in the current year.
The 2019 Grammy awards is slated for February 2019 and will return back to Los Angeles, Staples Center after switching to New York’s Madison Square Garden this year.
