Yesterday delivered the nominations for the forthcoming Grammy Awards which, much to the delight of its committee, was well-received.
Today, details have emerged about the nominations process. Specifically, in the Urban Contemporary and R&B categories.
Read below….
The committee’s Vice President Bill Freimuth bared all in a recent interview with ‘Billboard.’
Peep an excerpt from their conversation below:
The Urban Contemporary category really took a lot of us by surprise: Last year it was Beyonce and Chris Brown, and this year was The Internet and Kehlani and Lianne La Havas in addition to Miguel and The Weeknd. Was there a change in the description of that category?
No, there wasn’t. We’ve had the same definition for the last several years for that category. What the category was created to address originally was music that really, at its heart, R&B, but incorporating a lot of elements from hip-hop and electronic dance music and pop and more contemporary, forward-thinking production techniques, so it’s not an easy category to get screened into. A lot of the albums that are initially entered in that category end up getting moved to R&B if they don’t really have that kind of progressive vibe and blending of other genres in there, so the people who do our screening — there are different people every year — may have had something to do with it. We’ve also been doing quite a bit of outreach as an academy with the R&B music community. I don’t have any stats for you on that, but I would like to think that we’ve gotten quite a few more of the most prolific and relevant members of that [genre] to be members of the academy. While they’re tough to track and they might appear subtle, I do think that they play out in the nominations.
His explanation came after fans of the entertainer Ciara questioned the committee’s decision not to support her single ‘I Bet’, the only number from R&B female singer to score a Gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America this year.
Click here to find out who did make the cut.