Organizers of the Grammy Awards program have announced a major overhaul that will trim the number categories award by 31. The move will reduce the number of awards given out from 109 this year to 78 for the awards next year.
The Grammy Awards is the music industry’s top awards. In the move, a lot of the present categories will be merged into one award and some will be cut completely. There will also be new all-purpose categories for music from different genres.
The top four awards — which are album, record and song of year, and the best new artist ward — will be maintained as it is.
The president of the Recording Academy, Neil Portnow, said the decision to cut some of the categories comes after talks that involved “passionate discomfort” and that the decision will be unsettling to some artists. He said the cuts were however needed to keep up the prestige of the Grammy Awards.
Categories merged or dropped from the Grammy Awards
The awards given out during the three-and-a-half hour television broadcast of the Grammy Awards will not be affected. So TV viewers will not notice the new changes. Only 10 awards are handed out during the TV broadcast. The rest of the awards are given out earlier in the day in a ceremony broadcast on the internet.
One of the music genres that will be most affected by the cuts will be R&B. There will be only four awards given in this genre, down from eight this year. The awards for best R&B vocal performance by a male, female and a group has been merged into one Best R&B performance award.
This the Academy says is due to the low number of entries these categories have received over the last couple of years.
Also the awards for best male and female vocal performance has been merged into a single award, best pop solo performance.
The awards for best rock solo vocal performance and best rock vocal performance by a duo or group will be combined into the award, best rock performance.
Also the two awards in the metal and hard rock genre have also been combined. The award for best instrumental performance in the pop, rock and country categories have been dropped.
The genre of Rap was comparatively untouched. The number of awards in this genre has been reduced to four from five. The award for solo and group performance has been combined into a single best rap performance award.
Musicians in the Latin category will now compete for four awards, down from seven. Latin artists have their own Grammys, which is targeted at the international market whiles the awards given out the Grammy Awards are more centered around U.S. artists.
Jazz has been reduced to four categories from six. Classical will get nine awards categories, down from thirteen.
One of he cuts surely to get some criticism will be the dropping of the Hawaiian and Native American albums awards. They will now compete for a new category called regional roots music album.
A new rule has also been introduced to determine which categories could be cut in the future. If a category receives less than 25 entries for consideration, that category will be dropped for that years awards. This is an increase from the present 10 entrants requirement. If the category continues to receive less than 25 entries for three consecutive years, the category will be cut permanently.
Also if a category gets 25 to 39 entrants for consideration, only three of the entrants would get nominated for that years awards. There are normally five nominations in each category.
Officials say they will soon announce a date for the 2012 edition of the Grammy Awards in the coming weeks.
