Each year the Recording Academy's inbox is inundated with entries vying for the chance to be considered for the 61st annual Grammy Awards.
Only a handful of these will make it through the screening process, nominations and final voting to take the title of Grammy Award winner. But how does an artist's work become selected?
HOW ARE GRAMMY AWARDS DECIDED?
Each Grammy Award winner starts in the same way: Recording Academy members and record companies submit recordings and music videos to the academy.
Once received, the submissions embark on a journey through strict filtering stages. The volume of entries makes this process mammoth — the Recording Academy receives over 20,000 each year across 84 award categories.
The Screening Process
Before voting experts can decide on the most appropriate candidate to take home a Grammy, each eligible entry must be sorted.
A panel of more than 350 industry professionals, including artists, sound engineers, producers and songwriters, evaluate the submissions, attributing each with the appropriate categorisation and musical genre. From here, recordings are nominated for awards.
The Nomination Process
The recordings are sent to voting members, who vote only on entries related to their specific areas of expertise. Members vote for all 15 genre categories as well as the four biggest awards of the night: Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist. The ballots are tabulated and the nominees are finalised.
Final Voting Process
The final voting process follows in the same manner as the nomination process, albeit with a smaller and more distinguished pool of entries. Independent accounting firm Deloitte receives the ballots and delivers a sealed envelope containing the results only revealed live as the Grammys are televised.
As with many industry awards, there's contention among audiences regarding whether the awards are won for musical prowess or for commercial success.
The Recording Academy, however, says the awards are based upon peer honour and acknowledgment of technical and artistic achievement rather than sales of chart positions. The voting membership system requires votes to be made solely on quality without consideration for commercial performance.
Only approximately 12,000 of the Academy's total 21,000 members are eligible to cast votes for the winners.
Voting can be done online with the entire ballot process digitalised and secured by two-factor authentication.
In 2018, the Grammys allowed online voting for the first time, a change which resulted in the most diverse array of award nominations in the award's history.
Artist John Legend explained in an interview with The Independent that the previous postal vote option was problematic for artists who were touring, impeding on their chance to vote.
How do you become a member of the Recording Academy?
The Recording Academy's voting committee remains exclusive, requiring voters to adhere to a specific list of member requirements.
To be allowed to vote in the awards' decision-making process, members must hold at least one of three qualifications; be recognised for recordings released via physical distribution, be recognised for recordings released online only, or have received a Grammy nomination within the previous five years.
While the third category is more easily distinguished, the first two come with a lengthy list of rules.
For applicants wishing to obtain voting status via means of recording distribution, the recordings must first be commercially available for a US market.
Membership based on physical recording distribution also require the applicant to have six tracks in a single Grammy Award category released. Even more stringent, for online distribution, an applicant must have 12 qualifying tracks, one of which was released in the previous five years.
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