Tis' the (award) season

Serenity Corbett-Richardson

Turn down your radios and tune into your television for the 65th annual GRAMMYs. The most coveted award show in all of music is slated to be broadcast live from Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena on Sunday, Feb. 5, 2023. To fully enjoy the heartpounding, butterfly-inducing quiddity of the ceremonies, one must first understand the mechanics of such. While there are 91 total categories that offer the famed golden gramophone, there are just four that make up what is known as the “Big Four.”

These categories are most spoken about and televised and are as follows: Album of the Year (AOTY), Record of the Year (ROTY), Song of the Year (SOTY), and Best New Artist.

ROTY and SOTY are not to be confused — ROTY is defined by The Recording Academy as recognizing “the artists, producers and engineers who contribute to that recording,” while SOTY “deals with the composition of a song and recognizes the songwriters.”

For example, Taylor Swift’s recordbreaking “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” is nominated for a SOTY award because of its lyrical significance; not only is it the most commercially successful contemporary song for its length but it was written over a decade ago and only released from “the vault” per the request of Swift’s fans. On the other side of this, songs honored for ROTY at this year’s GRAMMYs are often the earworms heard on TikTok - songs like Beyoncé’s electropop hit, “BREAK MY SOUL” or Harry Styles’ newwave-inspired comeback anthem, “As It Was.” These songs did well on the charts, while that is less of a criterion for the lyric/compositionfocused SOTY. The most important general field category to artists themselves is Best New Artist. Winning this award can be indicative of a prosperous career, as shown by just a handful of previous winners Chance the Rapper, Amy Winehouse, and Cyndi Lauper. Although the name implies otherwise, nominees of this award are not necessarily new to the industry…just new to large-scale commercial success. Relevant artists that exemplify this would be Italian rock band Måneskin, who were formed in 2016, but were not honored by the Recording Academy until this year.

That’s not to say that newcomers don’t receive the nomination, because they very much do: alt-indie group Wet Leg, who were formed in 2019, gained popularity over the course of 2021 and 2022. This category is not the end-allbe-all of an artist or group’s success but it is a career apex for the winner nevertheless.

Perhaps the most popular category of all 91 would be Album of the Year. All ten albums nominated for the 65th annual GRAMMYs played a major role in the course of music this past year. Genres span ABBA’s Europop comeback “Voyage,” to Lizzo’s funky “Special,” to Bad Bunny’s reggaeton “Un Verano Sin Ti,” to Mary J. Blige’s R&B “Good Morning Gorgeous (Deluxe).”

Albums that win in this category are sure to remain industry staples for decades to come, (see: Paul Simon’s “Graceland” or The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”). Currently, the record for most AOTY wins by any one artist is held by Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, Taylor Swift, and Stevie Wonder - all having won in three separate instances. While no artists nominated this year have a chance of breaking this record, some previouslynominated artists may receive their first win in the category, namely, Kendrick Lamar: he has been nominated a total of three times in this category but lost to Daft Punk in 2014 and Adele in 2016.

To watch the results of the 65th annual GRAMMY awards, tune into CBS or stream on Paramount+...the industry standards for next year’s music are to be set.

Art by Sophia Sunbury