The Recording Academy announced today that, beginning with the eligibility period for the 2017 Grammy Awards (10/1/2015 – 9/30/2016), stream-only projects are officially available for Grammy consideration.
Our trustees felt like the time had come; it’s been on our radar for a couple of years now. The goal was to include recordings that were worthy of Grammy consideration that were streaming-only — which it turns out were a pretty small number — and exclude the 12-year-old singing a Beyonce cover into her comb that’s easy to put up online also these days for streaming.
–Bill Freimuth, Recording Academy SVP of Awards
That distinction will be made using a very specific set of guidelines, described in a press release as music that is “released via general distribution, defined as the nationwide release of a recording via brick and mortar, third-party online retailers, and/or applicable digital streaming services. Applicable streaming services are paid subscription, full catalog, on-demand streaming/limited download platforms that have existed as such within the United States for at least one full year as of the submission deadline.”
Did you get all that? One of the most important things to note here is the fact that the medium through which the project is streamed has to be a “paid subscription, full catalog, on-demand streaming/limited download platform,” which screams Spotify, TIDAL and Apple Music, and not Soundcloud or YouTube (for you struggle rappers thinking you’ve just come across a fast-track to Grammy glory).
It’s worth noting that this change to the Grammy rule has been campaigned for this year by no one more than Chance The Rapper, who has yet to release a retail project. The mixtape he released earlier this year, Coloring Book, was available for streaming on Apple Music and free download on DatPiff, but was not released for sale on any platform. Back in February, on the intro to Kanye West‘s The Life of Pablo album, Chance rapped “They say you got to sell it to snatch the Grammy / Let’s make it so free and the bars so hard / that it ain’t one goshdarn part you can’t tweet,” and publicly co-signed a fan’s petition asking the Recording Academy to make free music Grammy eligible.
There are still over 3 months left until the current Grammy consideration period is up, so it’ll be interesting to see how many artists decide to release their projects as “stream-only.” It looks like Chance has changed the game forever.
