On March 14, 2021, performers and viewers from all corners of the world waited with bated breath to celebrate the world’s newest Grammy recipients. The Grammy Awards—among the most prestigious accolades a musician can receive—are conferred each year by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, also known as the Recording Academy. Yet, according to some of the music industry’s most prominent artists, the world’s most highly regarded music award show is corrupt and elusive.
A focal point of their criticisms? The Grammy Awards selection process.
While individual artists and their labels can submit music to the Recording Academy for consideration, public input stops there: after each submission is reviewed and categorized, thousands of industry experts turn over award nominations to anonymous committees of “15-30 highly skilled music peers.” Members of the Recording Academy then participate in a second round of voting to decide the winners of each category. Although anonymous committees purportedly exist to uphold accountability and “eliminate the potential for a general-awareness bias” in the finalist selection process, they are also able to undercut public will by inserting additional names into the final ballot. After the controversial 2021 Grammy Awards, however, anonymous committees were abolished for all categories except those pertaining to “Craft” (such as composing, packaging, or production).
In 2020, Deborah Dugan, former Recording Academy CEO, voiced numerous grievances about the Grammys in a 46-page statement to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Commensurate with the many criticisms already highlighted by artists like Iggy Azalea and Ellie Goulding, Dugan described the Recording Academy as a “boys’ club” rife with favoritism, gender imparity, abuse of power and financial inconsistencies.
Year after year, women and people of color are also consistently underrepresented in Grammy Award rosters. The Recording Academy cannot justifiably defend the notion that only five people of color have warranted the Best New Artist title in the past two decades, that Herbie Hancock has been the only Black artist since 2008 worthy of an Album of the Year title, or that no female artists deserved nominations for Best R&B Album in 2020.
Individually, these examples could be outliers. But when BTS, the world’s fastest-growing Korean pop group, has to Americanize their music to earn a Grammy nomination; when The Weeknd—who shattered records in 2020 with his hit album, After Hours—is snubbed of any recognition from the Academy, both creators and the public have grounds to question what happens in the adjudication room. Artists like Frank Ocean and Eminem have, thus, chosen to boycott the Grammys altogether, citing the “dated” nature of “the awarding system and the nomination system and screening system.”
As viewers, we ought to join them.
A boycott would specifically involve artists refusing to attend the Grammys and viewers refraining from discussing or watching them. The impetus is both moral and pragmatic: a symbolic, public rebuff of the Recording Academy would not only be intrinsically valuable, but its effects would also spill over to institutions in the entertainment industry—such as the Oscars and Emmys—plagued by similar allegations of racism and sexism.
When we boycott, we speak with our dollars. Awards shows like the Grammys are corporations at their core; in fact, in a 2014 article for Complex, Rob Kenner—a Grammy voter—even admitted that “famous people tend to get more votes from clueless Academy members, regardless of the quality of their work” if it means they’ll attract an audience. Since viewership correlates with profit, it follows that an alarming drop in public support would drive the Grammys to acquiesce to public demands for greater equity and transparency. The media attention generated by a widespread boycott would also create space for sustainable dialogue about recognizing marginalized artists, a conversation that would hopefully persist even after reporters’ camera flashes dim.
Not all exposure, after all, is good exposure—at least not for the industry status quo. In fact, a 2013 study of boycotts and reputation management run by Dr. Brayden King of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management concluded that initially “symbolic attempt[s] to appease activists” can make “an opening for those activists to have some influence” and “a shift in values in the organization” as a whole.
It is unfortunate that a collective boycott is needed to catalyze change, but the progress attributed to movements like #OscarsSoWhite bears testament to the fact that public shows of disapproval can spur change. When, in 2015 and 2016, zero actors and actresses of color were nominated for Oscar awards, boycotts from ordinary social media users as well as celebrities like Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, Spike Lee, Idris Elba meant that the following year’s iteration of the Oscars saw people of color nominated in every single acting category.
In 2016, Roger Ross Williams, the first Black director to win an Oscar, discouraged a boycott of the ceremony on the grounds that “staying away from something that needs to change is no way to change it.” To some degree, his argument stands. Boycotts against companies attached to a significant personal cost—BP for its culpability in oil spills, Chick-fil-A for its stance on same-sex marriage, fast fashion companies for their use of unethical labor—often fail to gain traction because the general public demurs to long-term losses in convenience. Uniquely, however, a boycott of the Grammys would only last a single night. What’s more, while corporate boycotts often involve two diametrically opposed interests, the Recording Academy and its observers ostensibly hold the same end objective: a just, inclusive recognition process.
After the Recording Academy’s Diversity & Inclusion Task Force formed recommendations in 2018 for the Academy to take steps to ensure “better representation[s] of music’s diversity,” promote “female producers and engineers,” and “identify qualified, diverse candidates for committees,” among other objectives, these directives — and the Academy’s responses — largely targeted a symptom, not a cause, of inequity in the awards process. Upon closer inspection, the Academy was still “not convince[d]” by a call for a ranked choice voting system for General Field awards and did not address central points of concern in its award decision-making process, such as an unclear adjudication rationale and failure at times to recognize the cultural weight of music over profitability.
Evidently, there is still much room for improvement—and although hiring a diversity officer, creating the Black Music Collective for the “inclusion, recognition and advancement of Black music” and welcoming more women into the institution’s higher echelons have been commendable steps, such actions are insufficient for systemic change. The Academy does not need empty promises of fairness; it needs tangible changes to its nomination and judging process. It does not just need a diversity officer; it needs complete inclusion of people of all cultures and from all places.
The path to equality runs through the Recording Academy’s gleaming halls. It branches into the fight for diversity and inclusion in the broader entertainment industry, in national legislatures and in everyday life. For criticisms of this institution to actuate change, however, consumers and artists must reprimand it in languages it speaks: money, time and attention.
Until that shift happens, it’s time to say farewell.
Photo by Sudith Xavier licensed under the Unsplash License.
