Six Ways to Make the Grammy Awards Show More Relevant in the 21st Century

The Grammy Awards are the biggest night in music - here's how to make the show more interesting

The Grammy Awards show is one of the music industry's biggest nights, but it is not without its problems. The show's ratings/share has been dropping for the past five years straight. To many viewers, the show is largely stuck in the past in terms of presentation, format and style. How could it be improved and made more relevant for a 21st century audience? Here are a few suggestions.

Give the press and listeners a say in the matter

Voting has always been done exclusively by NARAS members, and the press and general public often disagrees with the eventual winners. This has resulted in rather embarrassing selections and awards in some well-known cases. In many ways, Grammy voting quite political in nature. There's often extra publicity, and thus extra money to be made if an artist is awarded a Grammy, so labels will lobby for their artists to be nominated, and try to encourage votes for their nominated artists. Bigger selling or more well known recordings always seem to have a leg up and increased chances of being nominated and winning than less well known yet critically acclaimed recordings, so since it's a popularity contest anyway, why not go all in and allow the music press to be involved with nominations, and give the general listening public a say in the voting along with NARAS members? Sure, that makes things even more likely to be influenced by popularity, but at least the public and press would have a stake in the game.

Show us more of what goes on behind the scenes

Not just behind the scenes at the awards show, or on the red carpet, but behind the scenes in terms of what goes on in the creation of the music that is up for the awards. It's called The Recording Academy - The National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, right? If the awards for engineering are too geeky to deserve attention (and keep ratings up) during the live TV broadcast, then at least show us a segment on how the records are made once in a while, and show us what goes on behind the scenes for concerts and tours. Who knows? You might actually inspire some young people to pursue careers in recording engineering and production, or maybe help foster more interest in learning how to play music by showing viewers how much fun and how exciting and rewarding those activities can be.

Quit patting yourselves on the back

MusiCares, The GRAMMY Foundation and other charitable endeavors are great, and it's fine to let the public know about them, but far too often the show spends too much time doing so, and the tone taken is too self-important, self-congratulatory, and self-indulgent. Keep the focus on the charity and on the music, and less on the Academy's directors and officers. The general public really doesn't care about who you are any more than they care about who engineered their favorite song, so what makes you think you're going to be any better for the TV ratings?

Embrace new technologies

Sales of physical disks are all but dead - tell us more about music streaming services and other new delivery methods, and how you're working to help listeners get easy access to the music they want, while simultaneously insuring that artists and labels are being fairly compensated for their work. One is no good without the other. Speaking of streaming, your awards show streaming could be improved, and adding better tools to to your website to help viewers quickly locate the segments from the show that they're interested in viewing would generate a lot more views in the days and weeks following the awards ceremony. This is busy age individuals are no longer confined to strict broadcast scheduling - make it easy for them to find what they want to see on their schedule!

Performances

It's fine to do the big production numbers with multiple musicians participating, or with tons of dancing, costumes and theatrics, but this is an awards show that's ostensibly about music, right? Yes, it's a live concert event, but don't try to wow us on the strength of the visuals; instead, feature exceptional musical performances. For me, the biggest highlight of the most recent show was veteran singer Annie Lennox's performance. Not because she's young and hip, not because there was tons of visuals and spectacle, but because her performance was musically and emotionally compelling. That's always relevant!

Record of the Year and Album of the Year

Records are antique physical objects that you can hold in your hands. The over-hyped vinyl resurgence aside, hardly anyone buys "records" (or compact disks) anymore. It's last century's terminology and technology, so why not change the name of the award from "Record of the Year" to "Recording of the Year" instead?

And as far as albums, as much as I love the idea of albums as an art form, they're largely irrelevant in this day and age. When was the last time you listened to a whole album uninterrupted from start to finish? Even "buying" individual songs is obsolete in the "stream whatever you want on-demand" era. I know this is going to be controversial, but in my opinion NARAS should just get rid of every award category with "album" in the title, including Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Rock Album, Best Rap Album, Best Country Album, Best Latin Jazz Album and all the rest. There's too many categories anyway. If you really feel like you need to keep one Album category for the sake of tradition, then keep Album of the Year, but even that alludes to a product that the general public is really just not that into anymore. The Academy should get with the times and focus more on individual songs instead of albums.  

Well there you have it - my six suggestions for how to make the Grammy Awards more relevant in the 21st Century. Do you disagree with me? Have some suggestions of your own you'd like to propose? Want to discuss this further? Then head on over to this thread in the Studio Trenches forum right here on Harmony Central and let's talk about it!

Phil O'Keefe is a multi-instrumentalist, recording engineer / producer and the Senior Editor of Harmony Central. He has engineered, produced and performed on countless recording sessions in a diverse range of styles, with artists such as Alien Ant Farm, Jules Day, Voodoo Glow Skulls, John McGill, Michael Knott and Alexa's Wish. He is a former featured monthly columnist for EQ magazine, and his articles and product reviews have also appeared in Keyboard, Electronic Musician and Guitar Player magazines.