Investigating Fraud at the Grammys
There are often claims that prestigious awards are rigged. This week I investigate that claim by looking at the Grammy for Album of the Year.
A couple of months ago, I read a fascinating piece from the publication Stars After Stars After Stars called “How I got booted as a Grammy voter”. If you’re interested in the music industry — and I suspect you are since you’re reading this — it’s worth your time. Here’s one of the passages at the end that caught my eye:
, the author of that piece, goes on to say that he has no direct proof that this is true. Part of the issue is that rumors circulate throughout the music industry all the time. But the other part is that there isn’t sufficient data on this topic. To quote Barber, “You can’t search by record label on the Grammy website, and no one has compiled a ‘nominations by label’ statistic anywhere that I can find.” Compiling stats is sort of my specialty. So, I decided to take a look. As always, this newsletter is also available as a podcast. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or click play at the top of this newsletter.There was a longstanding rumor about one particular LA-based label executive who oversaw the nominating committees. Allegedly, this executive would freely adjust the nomination lists to better reflect which people were in his favor each year. I don’t know if this story is true, but people in the business certainly believed it was true and therefore treated the whole enterprise as sort of a joke.
The Rumors That Might Be True
Trying to figure out which label won a Grammy is a tricky question. Here’s an example. Pearl Jam recently released Dark Matter, their 12th studio album. The label credit is listed as follows on streaming services:
Monkeywrench, Inc., under exclusive license to Republic Records, a division of UMG Recordings, Inc.
Let’s back up a little before we pick this apart. Pearl Jam began their career signed to Epic Records in the early 1990s. In 2006, they made the move over to J Records. Though J and Epic were technically different labels, they were both owned by Sony Music. So, at the end of the day, Pearl Jam was a Sony recording artist throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
Then in 2009, Pearl Jam left J for Monkeywrench, an independent label that they founded. Monkeywrench isn’t a label in the traditional sense. From what I can tell, the only band signed to Monkeywrench is Pearl Jam. The entire point of Monkeywrench — and many vanity labels created by established acts — is to license their music to an actual label for a limited time. The point of this setup is so that Pearl Jam can own their recordings in the long term while not having to deal with the headaches of distribution.
Getting back to Dark Matter, while it was technically released by Monkeywrench, Pearl Jam licensed it to Republic Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music. Republic, backed by money from their corporate parent Universal, will market and distribute Dark Matter.
I tell you all of this to make the point that it isn’t straightforward to identify which label released a particular piece of music, which is a necessary piece of information to try to figure out if the Grammys favor certain labels. For clarity, here is how I identified the label that released a piece of music:
All label data is sourced from Wikipedia and Discogs
If different labels released the same album in different countries, I took the label that released it in the United States
If the primary listed label was an artist vanity label with very few additional signings (e.g., Monkeywrench), I took the associated label that likely handled the marketing and distribution
If a label was a subsidiary of a large conglomerate (e.g., Warner Music Group), I took the subsidiary label because all of the subsidiaries still compete with one another even though they have the same parent company
Now that we are experts in the insanity that is corporate label structures, let’s see if there is any data-driven evidence for fraudulent behavior at the Grammys. To keep things simple, we will focus on Album of the Year, the Grammys’ most prestigious award.
During the 1960s, 16 labels had artists nominated for Album of the Year. During the 1970s, 23 labels had artists nominated. During the 1980s, 21 did. During the 1990s, 24 did. During the 2000s, 20 did. During the 2010s, 24 did. While there is consistency over the decades — most ten-year spans seeing 20 to 25 labels have their artists get the nomination nod — there is also a slight upward trend, meaning that we are seeing s few more labels having their artists nominated. Things get interesting when you look at who those labels actually are, though.
In February, I wrote about measuring sexism at the Grammys. The crux of that post was about how sexism could exist during the nominating process and winner selection process. One point I made in that piece was that if no women were nominated in a given year, you can’t really complain about sexism when no women won. They didn’t have a chance to win. The issue was with the nominations. To quantify winner selection gender bias, we could compare the rates women were nominated with the rates that they won. For example, in a world of gender egalitarianism, you’d probably expect 40% of winners to be women if 40% of nominees were women.
We can run a similar analysis for labels. By comparing the percentage of winners belonging to a label to the percentage of nominees belonging to that same label, we can see if a label is taking home a trophy more often than we’d expect given their number of nominations. Here are some trends that jump out when we run those numbers.
1960s: Both Capitol and Reprise took home more Album of the Year wins than expected given their number of nominations. This is not a terrible shock given that The Beatles were signed to Capitol and Frank Sinatra spent time on each of those labels throughout the decade.
1970s: The Recording Academy gave Motown and Columbia more Album of the Year trophies than expected. The former’s success is due to a single artist: Stevie Wonder. Wonder won each of his three nominations. Columbia’s nominations and wins cross a greater degree of artists, though.
1990s: Columbia far and away outperformed everyone else because of artists like Billy Joel, Mariah Carey, Bob Dylan, and Lauryn Hill.
2000s: Arista outperformed expectations given their number of nominations.
2010s: Columbia again returned with a strong performance, closely followed by Big Machine. Though Columbia had a few superstars, including Adele and Beyoncé, Big Machine’s run was completely driven by Taylor Swift.
When you look at these trends together, a few things become clear. First, The Record Academy loves certain artists. In the same way that The Beatles and Frank Sinatra got a slew of nominations in the 1960s, Stevie Wonder did the same in the 1970s, and Taylor Swift did the same in the 2010s. Part of the infatuation with these artists is that they are talented. But another part is that many of them are willing to play the game. Taylor Swift, for example, never speaks ill of the Grammys. If you express your displeasure with the award show, you are unlikely to continue getting nominated. That’s not fraud, though. That’s a fact of life.
Second, Columbia Records has had an incredible run over the last 60 years. Is this just due to them being better at discovering and developing talent than other labels? Probably to some degree. But I wouldn’t be shocked if Columbia — the oldest and most prestigious label around — was able to influence the Grammys a bit more than your average label. That’s when I realized that I had a smoking gun of sorts: Clive Davis.
Clive Davis is arguably the most famous living record executive. A lawyer by trade, he ran Columbia Records from 1967 to 1973 before founding Arista, the label he’d run until the turn of the century. Since then, he’s worked at some of the most successful labels in the business. Though the timelines don’t line up perfectly, two labels associated with the vaunted A&R man — namely, Columbia and Arista — won Album of the Year more frequently than you’d expect given the number of nominations they were receiving.
Was Clive Davis just better at signing and developing talent? Probably. But was he also able to tip the scales in his direction when necessary? Possibly. Now a nonagenarian, Clive Davis, the man behind the most famous pre-Grammy party, still remains incredibly powerful. And his track record isn’t spotless. In the 1970s, he was ousted from Columbia on charges of fraud and payola.
I’ll close by being clear that this isn’t direct proof of anything. I just wanted to see if a limited sample data aligned with some of the rumors outlined in the piece that I mentioned earlier. If you have any proof of Grammy fraud or a bigger dataset of Grammy nominees by label, please send it my way.
A New One
"MILLION DOLLAR BABY" by Tommy Richman
2024 - R&B
Recently, I’ve seen people apply the term “overnight sensation” to Tommy Richman. I get where those people are coming from. In a matter of days, Richman went from a protégé of singer Brent Faiyaz to having his latest track “MILLION DOLLAR BABY” rushing up the charts. But calling Richman an overnight sensation is misguided. He’s been releasing music for years with nobody watching. When you hear his silky falsetto over bouncy 808s on “MILLION DOLLAR BABY”, you’ll wonder how he was hiding in plain sight for so long.
An Old One
"Why Don’t You & I" by Santana ft. Chad Kroeger
2002 - Rock
Despite any accusation you could level at Clive Davis, his career is mind-blowing. One of the many miracles he worked was reviving Santana’s career in the late-1990s. Most people remember Santana’s collaborations with Rob Thomas (i.e., “Smooth”), Michelle Branch (i.e., “The Game of Love”), and The Product G&B (i.e., “Maria Maria”) from that era, but I think this earworm of a collaboration with Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger might stand above the rest after all this time.
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Very interesting post! I'm sure you are on to something. The Grammys definitely go through trends with artists that are getting all the industry attention at any given moment. In the end, is the Album of the Year really the best or is it just the best marketed towards Grammy voters? (The same is true about the Oscars.)
Side note, I love your single! It's on high rotation on my current playlist. Looking forward to hearing more!
Chad Kroger standing above the rest?!? Just come out and say it. You can’t hide anymore. You’re a….*gasp* NICKLEBACK FAN! I’ve lost all respect for you. Shame………
(Please know this is all in good fun 😂. Although that would be an interesting article. Why does everyone love to hate Nickleback.)