The Recording Academy doesn’t usually make headlines in June, but yesterday’s announcement gave the music world something to talk about. Five new categories are coming to the 69th Grammy Awards, set for February 7, 2027 and together, they say something significant about where music is, and where the Grammys are trying to go.
The new additions are:
- Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance
- Best Latin Song
- Best Asian Pop Music Performance
- Best R&B Collaboration or Duo/Group Performance
- Best Traditional Folk Album.
With these additions, the total number of Grammy categories rises to an even 100, a milestone that reflects decades of gradual expansion since the great category consolidation of 2012, which trimmed the show down to 78.
The GRAMMYs have unveiled five new categories ahead of next year’s ceremony:
Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance
Best Latin Song
Best Asian Pop Music Performance
Best R&B Collaboration or Duo/Group Performance
Best Traditional Folk Album pic.twitter.com/Vz6Q704D8x— Pop Base (@PopBase) June 16, 2026
Every year, Recording Academy members submit proposals for category changes. It’s a slow, deliberative process and that’s the point. When something finally makes the cut, it usually reflects a genuine pressure point in the industry, not a trend the Academy is chasing.
Grammy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. framed it plainly in a statement:
“The changes advanced by our Recording Academy members speak to the breadth of today’s music industry and the many genres, crafts, and creators shaping it.”
That “member-driven” framing matters. These categories weren’t handed down from some executive committee — they were pushed for by the musicians, producers, and engineers who actually work in these spaces.
What Each Category Actually Covers
Best Latin Song is perhaps the most overdue. The category will honor songwriters of newly written Latin songs recorded predominantly in Spanish (at least 51% of the lyrics). Until now, Latin songwriters had no dedicated songwriter award within the Latin Field — a significant oversight for a genre that accounts for a massive and growing slice of global streaming. Bad Bunny won Album of the Year at this year’s Grammys for an entirely Spanish-language record. The genre didn’t need more validation; it needed formal infrastructure.
Best Asian Pop Music Performance is being described as one of the most significant Grammy acknowledgments of Asian-language music to date. The category covers performances originating from or widely recognized in Asian markets, with meaningful use of one or more Asian languages — K-pop, J-pop, and C-pop are all explicitly included, but the category isn’t limited to those three. Given K-pop’s decade-long grip on global pop culture and the growing international reach of artists across Asia, the case for this category had been building for years.
Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance carves out space for artists whose approach to pop sits outside the contemporary mainstream — think Tony Bennett’s legacy, or the cohort of singers who’ve spent careers in the Great American Songbook tradition. It’s a recognition that “pop” has always had a classical strain running through it, and that those performers deserve their own lane rather than being wedged awkwardly into categories built around a different aesthetic entirely.
Best R&B Collaboration or Duo/Group Performance arrives alongside a notable rename: the existing Best R&B Performance category will now be called Best R&B Solo Performance. The logic is clean — solos and collaborations have always required different kinds of artistic chemistry, and collapsing them into one category regularly produced lopsided competition. The split gives both types of performance room to breathe.
Best Traditional Folk Album creates a dedicated home for recordings rooted in folk’s oldest traditions. As a direct consequence, the former Best Folk Album category has been renamed Best Contemporary Folk Album — a distinction that finally reflects what the genre has actually looked like for the past two decades, with contemporary folk artists pulling in elements of indie, Americana, and singer-songwriter styles that feel quite different from the more rooted, traditional end of the spectrum.
Beyond the Categories
The new categories weren’t the only announcement. The Academy also introduced Ballot Plus, an opt-in alternative to the existing voting structure that allows members with verified expertise across multiple genres to vote in up to 15 peer-related categories up from the current 10. It’s a targeted move to get more specialized voices into the room during nomination deliberations.
On the Best New Artist front, the Academy is raising the maximum number of times an artist can be entered for consideration from three to four. That change opens up possibilities for a number of artists who’ve had breakout years after exhausting their previous eligibility windows. It also quietly acknowledges something the industry has long known: “new” is a complicated concept in an era when an artist can spend years building a following before a single mainstream moment.
Songwriters are also getting more formal recognition. Going forward, songwriters and composers of new material on winning albums in most genre categories will receive Grammy statuettes and Achievement Certificates an acknowledgment that, as Mason put it, “it all starts with songwriters.”
The 2027 Grammys will also mark the ceremony’s first year airing on ABC, Disney+, and Hulu, after decades on CBS. So the institutional backdrop is already shifting. Against that context, five new categories particularly ones that center Latin songwriting and Asian pop performance — read as more than procedural housekeeping.
Whether the show follows through with nominations that actually reflect the global scope these categories imply is a separate question. But the architecture is there now. The door is open.
The 69th Grammy Awards take place on February 7, 2027, at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
