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Grammys Introduce New Country Album Category, Best New Artist Rules for 2026 (www.rollingstone.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The 2025 Grammy Awards were suspiciously great. Beyoncé finally won the coveted Album of the Year award for Cowboy Carter, which also scored Best Country Album and mined the history of Black musicians’ foundational contributions to country music. Chappell Roan and Doechii delivered powerful, moving speeches while accepting Best New Artist and Best Rap Album, respectively. The performances were stellar and there were no egregious snubs. What a night. The Recording Academy is ready to do it all again at the 2026 Grammys, but with a few caveats and changes to its categories and rules.

For starters, the Best Country Album award no longer exists in its previous form. When nominations are unveiled on Friday, Nov. 7, 2025, they will instead include Best Contemporary Country Album — the new version of this award — and the newly-introduced Best Traditional Country Album.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

this is going over hilariously on social media, despite the insistence by the Grammy's that it has nothing to do with Beyonce's win last year:

Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. told Billboard that the proposal for the two new categories was submitted previously several times before it passed this year. The new categories “[make] country parallel with what’s happening in other genres,” he explained, pointing to the other genres which separate traditional and contemporary. “But it is also creating space for where this genre is going.”

Traditional country now focuses on “the more traditional sound structures of the country genre, including rhythm and singing style, lyrical content, as well as traditional country instrumentation such as acoustic guitar, steel guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, piano, electric guitar, and live drums,” the 68th Grammys rulebook explains.