Grammys Add Songwriter Of The Year, Best Song For Social Change Categories

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Grammys Add Songwriter Of The Year, Best Song For Social Change Categories

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

This year’s Grammy Awards were disastrously boring, and they drew catastrophically low ratings. Clearly, the whole awards-show institution needs to make some major changes. The people behind the Grammys seem to realize that, and they’ve responded the way that they always respond: by adding a bunch of new awards categories.

As Variety reports, the Recording Academy has just announced a bunch of new categories and rule changes. The biggest of those new awards is probably the category of Songwriter Of The Year, Non-Classical, which is specifically intended to recognize, as the Academy puts it, “the most prolific non-performing and non-producing songwriters for their body of new work released during an eligibility year.”

The Grammys have also added categories for Best Alternative Music Performance and Best Americana Performance. (They already had Best Alternative Album and Best Americana Album; the most recent winners of those two awards are St. Vincent and Los Lobos, respectively.) There are also new awards for Best Score Soundtrack For Video Games And Other Interactive Media and also for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album — two new categories that would’ve made perfect sense if the Grammys added them in 1997.

The noisiest of the new awards, however, is probably the nebulously defined “Special Merit Award Addition” for “Best Song For Social Change.” The Academy defines the award like this: “Submissions must contain lyrical content that addresses a timely social issue and promotes understanding, peacebuilding, and empathy.” Maybe the problem with the Grammys is that the show doesn’t allow for enough self-righteous grandstanding.

Another new rule is that albums nominated for awards need to include at least 75% new material; the previous threshold was 50%. Presumably, this rule was added to stop the Academy from nominating deluxe editions of albums that had come out before the eligibility window. We’ll see how all these changes shake out next year.

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