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USA TODAY
The Recording Academy, the body behind the Grammy Awards, has weathered controversy in recent years stemming from a lack of diversity in its membership, nominations and awards.
Between 2018 s #GrammysSoMale hashtag and former president Neil Portnow suggesting that women need to step up to be recognized to Diddy s 2020 lament over the awards treatment of Black music, the Recording Academy has been put to task.
The academy has pushed to diversify its membership and organization, accelerating efforts over the last year. Will the efforts ensure the slate of winners Sunday night reflect current music tastes and sales charts, or will they fall back into prior less-than-inclusive patterns?
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The announcement in December that three of the five Grammy nominees for best children s album were asking to have their names withdrawn from the ballot reverberated through the industry, bringing attention not just to the Recording Academy s ongoing struggles with diversity, but also to music too often overlooked by anyone except for children and their parents. In a year marked by the most powerful social justice protests in nearly a half century a year that saw the Recording Academy pledge to create a more diverse and inclusive membership and voting process all of the nominees were white, and all but one of them were men. This even though there had been no lack of notable children s music releases from artists of color in 2020.
If Harvey Mason Jr. has any say in the matter, the future of the Grammy Awards and the Recording Academy under whose auspices the 63-year-old Grammys are presented will be all about greater inclusion, transparency, diversity and equity.
Each is imperative for the music world’s most prestigious and comprehensive annual awards show, whose audience-free 2021 edition will be televised March 14 by CBS TV and will be the first to be he held without an audience. The academy has been increasingly criticized in recent years for not doing more to broaden its membership base. Likewise, the Grammys have taken flak for failing to adequately honor hip-hop and Black and women artists in its most prestigious categories: Album of the Year, Record of the Year and Song of the Year.
Grammy awards body to study women s representation in music business | Grammys theguardian.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theguardian.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.