“This is a very special event and a special day. For the next three hours, we’re going to honor and celebrate this amazing year in music.”

On Feb. 3, Henry Mason Jr opened the 67th Annual Grammy Awards with an enthusiasm to continue to honor the promise that the Recording Academy has been making to its viewers and the music industry for years. As they state on their website, “The mission of the Recording Academy is to recognize excellence in the recording arts and sciences, cultivate the well-being of the music community, and ensure that music remains an indelible part of our culture.” While music continues to remain an indelible part of our culture, it seems that the role of music awards, especially the GRAMMYs are becoming less central. The 2025 GRAMMYs saw a 9% decline in viewership and represented the fourth-lowest TV audience since the start of the new millennium.

Furthermore, since 2018, there has been a noticeable decline in artist attendance at the GRAMMYs as well as their increasing refusal to submit their music to the Academy for consideration. Several artists such as Zayn Malik, André 3000, and The Weeknd have openly spoken up against the GRAMMY voting process and expressed their concerns about its biases against certain genres, artists, and its institutional racism. For example, although hip-hop/rap is consistently the most popular genre in American music, it is severely underrepresented in the Big 4 awards. Since its conception, only 2 hip-hop/rap albums have won the prestigious Album of the Year award. Similarly, country music – culturally integral to the American music landscape – has only 3 albums that have ever won Album of the Year. Although there are genre-specific awards for these categories, genres that are not pop are inadequately represented in this category. This is problematic on several levels: it suggests to everyday viewers that pop music and music are interchangeable, and rather than using its unique position as the most prestigious and influential music awards to promote musical diversity and encourage creation and change in the musical landscape, the GRAMMYs may actually narrow the world of music and the viewer’s perception of it. Fortunately, due to social media and easy access to discussion forums, viewers are no longer passive receivers of one-dimensional discourse – rather they have entered the space as active participants. The decline in viewership and ratings of the GRAMMYs, the increasing absence of artists at the ceremony despite nominations or invitations, and their refusal to submit their music for evaluation, all result from this active participation and the ever-evolving conversation of what place the GRAMMY’s hold in today’s world of music.

This is an increasingly relevant question to answer because the 2025 GRAMMY Awards were historic in the number of changes that the Academy implemented in the voting process and award categories as a reform response to the criticism they had received in recent years related to bias, racism, and manipulation of voting committees.

Since The Weeknd called for a boycott against the GRAMMYs in 2021, the Academy has eliminated the anonymous voting committees to decide nominations and opened the voting process to a broader category of all its voting members. In the last four years, they have expanded their pool of voting members to ensure inclusivity, and diversity as well as to remain relevant and align with modern music. As of 2024, 66% of the voting members have joined in the past five years, reflecting a more contemporary and inclusive representation of the music community. For the 67th GRAMMY Awards this year, several genre award categories such as Best Traditional R&B Performance, and Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album were refined to better fit the modern interpretations and include more artists from other musical communities. These efforts clearly show that the Recording Academy sees itself playing an integral role in contemporary music. However, the question remains: Do people agree? And perhaps, most importantly, is it even up to the Academy to decide what role the GRAMMYs will play in the future?

One of the fundamental issues with The Academy Awards is that, with over 90 Award Categories, it may simply be too large to ever truly do justice to all genres of music and the different, creative ways modern artists approach them. There will always be some that will be diluted and overshadowed, and some that are given more spotlight, whether that is a conscious choice or simply a result of structural limitations. Despite its intentions, if the GRAMMYs continue to maintain their prestige, relevance, and influence in launching new artists, several issues may worsen and an already polarized space may become even more polarized. Rather than forging unity in the musical landscape, the lack of recognition along with overexposure of certain genres and artists may cause viewers to further dissolve into separate, distinct groups and foster hostility and resentment between them. It may cause artists and viewers of marginalized genres to feel increasingly isolated. Rather than shaping a future musical landscape that honors heritage and works from all genres and encourages space for innovation, fusion, and creativity, it may lead to monotony by favoring one type of music and decreasing incentives for artists to take risks and create something new. We may no longer find a hallmark record and the purpose of the art may be threatened.

However, if there is something that the 2025 GRAMMYs showed us, it is that the Academy is trying to take steps in a reformative direction, shifting focus from awarding standard, safe music to more groundbreaking pieces of work. At the same time, the removal of the anonymous voting committees has created a more inclusive set of artist nominations and awards, especially in the Big 4 category. With Beyoncé becoming the first African-American Woman to win Album of the Year and Kendrick Lamar making history with a hip-hop/rap song winning both Song of the Year and Record of the Year, the ceremony definitely took leaps toward a new direction.

There is one last point to consider. In an increasingly neo-liberal, digitalized world do large institutions like the Recording Academy still hold significant influence over arts like music? In recent years, we have seen an increase in small social-media community artists, and their popularity fostered by easier access to organizing tours and reaching an audience of committed viewers. Perhaps, the number of GRAMMYs an artist holds is no longer a testament to their work. In an increasingly individualistic world perhaps music is no longer seen as a discipline to be evaluated, but rather words and feelings to be expressed and felt.