(Reuters) In a major Grammys overhaul designed to reduce the bloated structure of the music industry’s top awards, organizers said on Wednesday they would slash the number of categories to 78 from 109 for next year’s ceremony.
Many existing categories will be merged, while some will be dropped outright with contenders from different musical genres required to compete in new, all-purpose categories.
The top awards — album, record and song of the year, and best new artist — will remain untouched.
Recording Academy president Neil Portnow said the changes followed discussions that involved “some pretty passionate discomfort” and would be “a little unsettling” to some musicians.
But he said a restructuring was necessary to maintain the “prestige of the highest and only peer-recognized award in music”.
Television viewers will not notice the changes, since only about 10 awards are announced during the three-and-a-half hour telecast. The rest are handed out earlier in the day during a fast-paced ceremony that is broadcast on the Internet
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The R&B field suffered one of the biggest cuts, with the number of awards halved to four. The three R&B vocal performance awards for males, females and groups have been merged into a single R&B performance award.
The Recording Academy’s Vice President of Awards, Bill Freimuth, said some of the R&B categories had not received many submissions in years past.
Among other changes, the separate awards for male and female vocal performance will now be combined into a new pop solo performance category.
Similarly a new award, rock performance, replaces the separate awards for rock solo vocal performance and rock performance by a duo or group with vocals.
The two metal and hard rock categories have also been merged. In the pop, rock and country fields, the prizes for instrumental performance have been dropped.
Rap escaped relatively unscathed, with the number of awards dropping to four from five with the merging of the solo and group performance races into a simple rap performance category.
The number of Latin awards was cut to four from seven. Artists in this genre have their own separate awards show, the Latin Grammys, which is aimed at international markets while the Grammy categories are U.S.-centric.
The jazz awards have also been cut to four, from six. Nine awards will be handed out in the classical categories, down from 13.
