Grammys Reduce Four Top Awards — Album, Song, Record of the Year and Best New Artist — From 10 to Eight Nominees

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Grammys Reduce Album, Song, Record of the Year and Best New Artist From 10 to Eight Nominees As it does every year, the Recording Academy has updated its rules and guidelines following its semiannual board of trustees meeting, and while three new categories were announced earlier this week, one major change was unveiled today among several less-impactful ones: The four top categories — album, song and record of the year and best new artist — have been reduced to eight categories from 10.

An AI-related rule was also introduced, which effectively states that only human creators are eligible for awards, but, like all things AI, requires an extensive series of caveats to cover the vast possibilities that the technology makes possible in this still-developing area; the full list appears below.) The number of nominees for those categories were suddenly expanded from eight to 10 in November of 2021, just before the 2022 nominees were announced — a surprising and confusing turn of events, as such changes usually take place after the annual board meetings.

While Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. told Variety at the time that the change was “an incredible opportunity for us to honor more artists and shine a light on more great music, and potentially offer a greater opportunity for more genres of music to be honored,” some suspected that it was done to ensure that Taylor Swift received a best new album nomination for her album “Evermore” and thus increase the chance that she would appear on the show and boost its ratings; however, that accusation, which was soundly refuted by the Academy, was undercut by the second album that benefited from the expansion: “Donda” by Kanye West, whose