"The Grammys are a popularity contest" deep-dive.
Taking a closer look at whether the most popular album actually takes home the trophy on music's biggest night.
"The Grammys are rigged!" "That they don't measure talent!" "The Grammys are a popularity contest!" are frequent phrases used this time of year among music fans to help us cope when our favorite songs, artists, and albums lose an award that feels well deserved. I wanted to research to see how true some of those statements are.
For simplicity's sake, I looked at the ten most recent awards to test this out. I also used the website Album Of The Year to get an aggregate number of the critical acclaim score of each album. Since total album sales for every album can be complex to find and some albums have a lifespan after the awards, I used the first week's sales from Billboard to determine the popularity of each record.
In the past decade, 7/10 of the winners of the most significant award in music came from 1 of the Top 2 best-selling albums of the given year. Only 3/10 of the winners were the overall best sellers (1989, 25, and Folklore).
So, an album's popularity tells more than the whole story of whether or not an album will win. It can help us narrow down the field, but it combines critical acclaim and being somewhat famous.
In the past decade, all albums that took home Album Of The Year were not the least critically acclaimed amongst the nominees (see table above for Year Critic Rank column). At the very least, every album that has won has ranked in the upper half for the critical acclaim score.
Only once in the past ten years has the most critically acclaimed album of the given year been the one to take home the trophy. Taylor Swift Folklore was the #1 critically acclaimed album in 2020 (it was also the most commercially successful among nominees, so it had that going for it, too). Although a 10% chance doesn't bode well for boygenius fans, as The Record is the most critically acclaimed amongst this year's nominees - it has a chance!
Let’s look at our 10 nominees again this year and where they land among sales popularity and critic score (and feel free to check out our reviews).
Jon Batiste – World Music Radio
Boygenius – The Record
Miley Cyrus – Endless Summer Vacation
Lana Del Rey – Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd
Janelle Monáe – The Age of Pleasure
Olivia Rodrigo – Guts
Taylor Swift – Midnights
SZA – SOS
So, knowing what we know, we can safely eliminate World Music Radio, Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, Endless Summer Vacation, and The Age of Pleasure, as they don't likely have enough critical or commercial appeal to win.
The race is between Midnights, SOS, GUTS, and The Record. If we look at our stat, about 70% of the winners are from the top of the top commercially; the race is really between Midnights and SOS.
It's hard to ignore Taylor Swift for AOTY for having such an unprecedented level of success this year. Still, when it comes down to the appeal of the Midnights album, it's unlikely for the recording academy to award Taylor her 4th AOTY win for an album that is less highly praised than her other winner.
So when it comes down to it, this is SZA's Grammy to lose. She's got the perfect mix of critical acclaim and massive success for SOS. It would be fitting for the Recording Academy to make up for SZA losing all her nominations in 2018 when she was the most nominated female artist that year.