Note: This article was first published after the 2025 Grammy nominations were announced. We’ve since added a new section at the end with our thoughts following the 2026 nominations, so be sure to scroll to the end for our updated analysis.
The very first televised Grammy Awards (then called “The Best on Record”) aired in 1963. Frank Sinatra opened the broadcast by introducing the Grammy trophy and explaining that the awards were given “not for selling a million records, mind you — you get bread for that. This is for contribution for the art of recording.”
The first Recording Academy President, Paul Weston, was even more direct, saying in 1959, “We do not honor commercial success. Our purpose is to recognize artistic achievement by the creative persons in the industry. Record sales is not the factor that governs our awards.”
That founding principle — that Grammys were meant to reward artistic excellence, regardless of commercial success — guided the Recording Academy for more than 60 years. Even when Grammy voters notoriously missed the mark with their choices, as they often did, the intent was still to honor the very best music.
Unfortunately, it’s questionable whether that is the case anymore. In 2021, after an understandable outcry following the snub of the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. gave in to the loudest voices on social media and made an important decision to eliminate the “review committees” that for three decades had been used to curate the nominees.
Doing away with these secret groups has made the Grammys more transparent, and perhaps more trustworthy in the eyes of the average pop music listener. But it’s also taken the Recording Academy further away from its initial mission statement of awarding artistic achievement over commercial success.
Five years later, has the elimination of these committees helped or hurt the Grammys in the big picture?
History and Purpose of Review Committees at the Grammys
In the ’80s and ’90s, the Grammys had a well-deserved reputation of catering to the most bland, middle-of-the-road music, consistently rewarding safe, adult contemporary-leaning acts like Bette Midler, Phil Collins, and Will Smith over more innovative and interesting performers such as Madonna, Rage Against the Machine, and Public Enemy.
The low point came in 1995, when Album of the Year featured one rising pop singer, Seal, alongside four aging veterans: 46-year-old Bonnie Raitt; 50-year-old Eric Clapton; the Three Tenors, an opera trio with an average age of 54; and 68-year-old Tony Bennett, who won the prize. The category had no alternative music, no hip hop, nothing that would appeal to anybody under 50. The Grammys were clearly out of touch.
That embarrassing nominee lineup caused record company executives to demand change from Recording Academy President Michael Greene. They actually threatened to withhold funding for the Academy if he didn’t fix the problem.
Greene took the review committee concept, which had already been in place for classical and jazz categories, and applied it to the Big Four awards (Best New Artist, plus, Record, Song, and Album of the Year) specifically to remove “popularity and sentimentality” from the voting process.
Immediately, the committees paid dividends, as the 1996 Album of the Year race featured younger and edgier acts like Pearl Jam, Alanis Morissette, and Joan Osborne. The following year would feature Beck, Smashing Pumpkins, and the Fugees. The committees were working.
For nearly three decades, the Grammys used these committees in most major categories to finalize the nominees. These groups of 15 to 30 industry insiders would take the top 20-30 choices of the full Grammy voting body, and narrow them down to the final five nominees. That gave the committees the power to choose under-the-radar artists who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten enough votes to make the final cut.
Over time, review committees were added to most genre fields, including Country, Dance, Rock, Rap, and R&B. At one point, more than 50 Grammy categories had their nominees determined by committees.
Countless artists benefited from the committees, earning nominations in major categories where they likely would not have appeared otherwise. This included not just up-and-coming acts like India.Arie, Corinne Bailey Rae, and H.E.R., but also deserving veterans like Ray LaMontagne, a 2011 Song of the Year nominee, and Sturgill Simpson, who was up for Album of the Year in 2017.
Even Brandi Carlile was still largely unknown to the mainstream pop world in 2019, before she got nominated for “The Joke” and stole the show with an extraordinary vocal performance on the Grammy stage. Her career has completely taken off since then. Would she have gotten those first Record and Song of the Year nods without the committee? Possibly… but probably not.
Where Are the Under-the-Radar Artists in the Major Categories These Days?
Since 2022, nominees in all Grammy categories (except for a small number of technical awards like Producer of the Year and Best Immersive Audio Album) are determined by a straight popular vote.
This is supposed to eliminate controversy and keep a small group of gatekeepers from overriding the will of the full Grammy voting body.
It was a well-intentioned decision. But it’s had consequences.
Consider the case of Sierra Ferrell, a rising star in the genre of Americana, the singer-songwriter-friendly zone where country meets folk.
Ferrell was nominated for four 2025 Grammy Awards, and she won all four. That means she won more Grammys that year than Beyonce. More than Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan combined. More than everyone else, except Kendrick Lamar, who captured five.
Ferrell was the biggest artist of the year in roots music that year, as evidenced by her win for Artist of the Year and for Album of the Year at the 2024 Americana Awards. Her Grammy wins just provided further proof.
Yet if you watched the 2025 Grammy Awards broadcast, you never heard Sierra Ferrell’s name mentioned even once. She won all of her awards on the non-televised pre-show, and therefore didn’t get any screen time during the prime time telecast.
Five or ten years ago, it wouldn’t have been this way. The review committees would’ve made certain to nominate an obvious star-in-the-making like Ferrell in some major categories. Definitely Best New Artist and Song of the Year, for her brilliant tune “American Dreaming.” Possibly Album of the Year, for Trail of Flowers.
Ferrell and others like her, who are creating excellent music but not selling millions of records or getting much radio airplay, are finding themselves largely shut out of the major categories these days.
Now that all 13,000 members of the Recording Academy are determining the nominees for Album, Record, and Song of the Year, it’s nearly impossible for the Sierra Ferrells of the world to get nominated there. They simply don’t have the name recognition or commercial success.
In this way, the Grammys are rapidly morphing into the American Music Awards. They’re becoming a simple popularity contest, rather than honoring the best music.
Somehow Ferrell can win four Grammys, yet very few music fans notice, except the die hards who streamed the pre-show online. She got no Song of the Year nomination, no performance slot, no tv time, and no explosion in record sales, all of which she might have received if the review committees were still in place.
The same was true of rock singer Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, who won three 2025 Grammys, including Best Alternative Music Album, but received no mention on the main broadcast and no nominations in the biggest categories.
Another example is the Last Dinner Party, one of the more promising rock bands to emerge in recent years. The British female group deserved a Best Rock Album nod, but lost out to a host of way-past-their-prime bands, including Pearl Jam, Jack White, Green Day, and the Black Crowes. The Last Dinner Party might have gotten a nom if the category still had a review committee.
Sadly, the lack of emerging artists in these categories is likely to continue in the post-committee era.
One of the few artists to make it into the Album of the Year field in recent years without selling millions of records was pop-jazz performer Jacob Collier, a 2025 nominee. But he earned his first AOY nod in 2021, the last year of the review committee. That raised his profile and gave him the name recognition he needed to appear in the category again.
ABBA to Andre 3000: The Worst Grammy Picks in the Post-Committee Era
When the Academy announced it would be removing the review committees in 2022, we were one of the few outlets warning that this was a bad idea. We reminded readers that without these committees, there would be nothing to keep voters from making the perplexing choices that gave the Grammys such a bad reputation in the first place.
So far, things haven’t been as bad as we feared. That’s to the credit of Academy members, who have mostly made sensible voting decisions in the past four years.
But there have been a handful of obvious embarrassments, where voters clearly made selections based on sentimentality and personal affection rather than the quality of the music. Most notably, ABBA, the ’70s dance act, inexplicably got nominated for Record of the Year in both 2021 and 2022 for songs that almost no one heard.
In 2025, the Beatles got nominated for Record of the Year for their last song, “Now and Then,” which was stitched together from old audio clips and cleaned up using AI. It’s a good song. But it obviously didn’t deserve a Record of the Year nom.
The same was true of the Album of the Year nomination for Outkast rapper Andre 3000, for his instrumental album of flute music. Absolutely nobody thought that was one of the best records of the year. But they voted for Andre because they liked him as a person. And because, like ABBA, his name appeared at the top of the alphabetical list of contenders (yes, this is actually a factor, which is a whole separate issue.)
Andre 3000 getting an Album of the Year nod was not only embarrassing to the Academy, it was insulting to the artists who did much better work and deserved that spot.
The 2025 Album of the Year field was strong — but imagine how much stronger it would’ve been if a review committee existed that could’ve replaced Andre 3000 and Jacob Collier with better choices. Maybe Sierra Ferrell and St. Vincent could’ve taken those slots. Or one could’ve gone to Doechii, the hottest emerging rapper of the moment.
When they were in place, the review committees weren’t perfect. They sometimes made bad choices, and that’s what drew a lot of the criticism. It’s hard to make a case for nominating Coldplay for Album of the Year in 2021. Or excluding the Weeknd that year.
But on balance, we think the nominees looked better during the 25 years the Grammys used review committees than they do today.
Popularity and sentimentality — the two factors Greene rightly sought to eliminate from the voting process in 1996 — are back in full force.
Somehow, the Grammys have to get back to their original mission statement, and remember that commercial success shouldn’t be the standard by which good music is judged.
2026 Update: Good Music Still Being Overlooked
Here’s some additional analysis following the 2026 Grammy nominations announcement. Firstly, the Recording Academy eliminated the alphabetical lists of nominees that sometimes resulted in artists whose names were at the beginning of the alphabet having an advantage.
That’s great news! It means no more Abba or Andre 3000 earning a major category nomination based solely on name recognition.
Elsewhere, though, the lack of secret committees is still having a negative effect on the awards. As the Academy has become more diversified, genres like country music and traditional pop are now getting the shaft.
Three terrific country artists should have been in contention for Best New Artist this year: Zach Top, Ella Langley, and Megan Moroney. Despite eight nomination slots, none of these three were nominated. In fact, since the Academy removed its committees, only one mainstream country act (Jelly Roll) has gotten a Best New Artist nod. (To be fair, a couple Americana-leaning, country-adjacent acts like Molly Tuttle and The War & Treaty have also been nominated.)
Country artists were also shut out of the Big 3 categories of Record, Song, and Album of the Year. There are 8 nominees in each of these categories now. That’s 32 total nominees for these four categories, including Best New Artist. Not one of those 32 nods was worthy of going to a country act?
Country music is experiencing a major surge in popularity, but because only 7% of Academy voters come from the country genre, that boom isn’t being reflected in the Grammy world.
Did the Academy go too far in diversifying its membership, to the point that genres like country are now always going to be snubbed? Of course, after decades of white artists dominating the Grammys, no one’s going to feel sorry that white artists have been brought down to equal footing with their peers of color. But, as Billboard points out, by snubbing country music, the Academy is still failing in its mission to reward the year’s best music.
Another example: Elton John and Brandi Carlile were widely expected to earn an Album of the Year bid for their collab effort Who Believes in Angels? They are exactly the kind of safe, mainstream artists who have traditionally won that award in the past.
Instead, the album was overlooked, appearing only in the Best Traditional Pop Album category. Grammy bigwigs are probably happy about this, because a John/Carlile win over Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar, and Lady Gaga would’ve resulted in an outcry among critics and social media watchers, and would have reinforced the notion that the Grammys are out of touch. The John/Carlile Album of the Year snub eliminated that possible outcome.
But here’s the thing: Who Believes in Angels? was a fantastic album. It legitimately deserved an Album of the Year nom. It featured barnburning, old-school rock & roll in the vein of Little Richard, plus gorgeous ballads like Carlile’s “You Without Me” (a beautiful song about watching her daughters grow up) and John’s “When This Old World is Done With Me,” a powerful track about facing one’s mortality.
Who Believes in Angels? should have been an Album of the Year nominee. But given the new, younger makeup of the Recording Academy, it apparently didn’t have a chance.
Do you think the review committees are working? Or are the Grammys now too focused on rewarding commercial success?
Last Updated on June 29, 2026