Country Music Seemingly Shunned From Award Consideration At The Grammys
This Sunday, February 1, the 68th Grammy Awards will be held at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, California.
This year’s ceremony will be the first to include a new category dedicated to country music: the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Country Album.
Further, the category that was previously known as Best Country Album is now Best Contemporary Country Album to distinguish it from the new category devoted to traditional country music.
Beyond that, country artists are also nominated in all of the other country music categories, but a question continues to linger over this year’s major category nominations: where is country music?
Looking at the Grammy Award nominations for Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist, country music is nowhere to be seen.
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Recoding Academy CEO Addresses Country Music Exclusion
The 2026 Grammy Award nominations come in a year that saw new albums by county artists like Blake Shelton, Zach Top, Eric Church, Russell Dickerson, Kelsea Ballerini, and Bailey Zimmerman.
Of course, one of the biggest events in music in 2025, Morgan Wallen’s release of I’m The Problem, was not submitted to the Grammys for award consideration.
In an interview with Variety, Harvey Mason Jr., the CEO of the Recording Academy, was asked about the absence of country music from the major all-genre categories.
Responding to the question, which framed country’s lack of representation in the nominations to how hip-hop used to be neglected, Harvey said, “I really hope it doesn’t turn into that type of dialogue based around politics or right or left, because it really is not that; it’s really about what the voters choose to vote for every given year, and it is cyclical.”
Presently, the Recording Academy has approximately 15,000 voting members, with 3,800 new members being added within the past year.
Continuing, Harvey said, “There have been other times where there’s been different representation. We will be looking into all our genre categories and the voters associated with them and making sure they are balanced, like we do every year. And after this year, we’ll do it again.”
Similar questions have been raised about membership with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which has seen nominations lean toward international cinema as its membership’s diversity is expanded.
Expounding upon the issue of representation among the Recording Academy’s membership, Harvey said, “It’s generally not based on who gets nominated, though, to tell you the truth. It’s based on, do we have a representative voting body of the different genres? And provided that we have the right percentage and ratios, then we’ll be in the right spot. We can’t tell what those people will vote for, but we can make sure that we have a representative voting body.”
Asked if he thought there may have been a “split vote” situation among members regarding what was nominated, Harvey replied, “It’s hard to predict why we get the results that we do. All I know is it’s heartbreaking for me when somebody’s not represented, whether that’s an individual artist or a genre, because I know how hard people work in this business. I want us to make sure we’re getting it right, so we continue to do everything we can as an organization, along with our elected leaders, to make sure we’re positioning our voters to make the best decisions they can.”
Concluding his thoughts on this matter, Harvey stated, “We look at the number of voters and make sure that it matches the amount of music that’s being created in that specific genre or region or that age group. There’s so many different ways of cross-sectioning it, but we have to make sure we have enough qualified voters representing genres not even just in the general field, but in the specific genre categories.”
The Grammy Awards will begin at 8 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 1, on CBS, with streaming available on Paramount Plus.
See what all was nominated at the 2026 Grammys at its official website, and watch the nomination announcement, here:
Last year’s Grammys saw Beyoncé win Album of the Year for her foray into country, Cowboy Carter, which is a victory that has proved to be controversial.
The Song of the Year category at the 2025 Grammys saw Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” nominated, and Shaboozey was also nominated for Best New Artist.