The Grammys are considering adding an Afrobeats category for the first time since 1999. This would bring the category into line with the mainstream categories such as Pop, Rock, R&B and Rap.
The idea is to have a music category where there is more diversity in the nominees by presenting more artists and categories from other categories and bringing in some new artists to the scene.
This is a big deal to us, and we have been advocating for this for some time. But even if it does happen, Afrobeats will always be a niche music scene.
And while we think the “Afrobeats” will still be a small niche category, we believe it will still be an important category to play in and we will continue to advocate for it.
In fact, we’ve been talking about getting Afrobeats as an official category since the beginning of this year. And we will be making other changes to the awards show to get more diversity. We are already working on a new system to help the show avoid bias in the category, so that there are no more artist-specific categories.
Here’s a rundown of how we think Afrobeats (and our other categories) can gain recognition:
More music videos. This year, the Grammys only saw four video submissions from Afrobeats. Now we think we can get to at least 10. And this would be a great move for a category whose focus has been less on music videos than on music and artist’s live performances.
More artists. Right now, only three Afrobeats artists were nominated: Wizkid and Waju. While we don’t think this is a huge problem, we would like to see more artists as nominees. We believe a wide-variety of nominees could create a better diversity of ideas in the room. And we think it could help artists by giving them more chances to be recognized in the best of categories.
More categories. Right now, the categories are all genre-based: R&B, Rock, Pop, Country. We think the Afrobeats category could be expanded to the other genres as well such as R&B and House, or to include more genre-specific categories: Hip Hop, Gospel, Latin Jazz. While
