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:

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.

James Barber

, 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.

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.

Dark Matter, the latest album from Pearl Jam

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.