Are the Grammys Snubbing Country?—Academy CEO Comments

Photo Credit: Harvey Mason Jr. by M. Kovac / CC by 4.0

Fans have noticed some major gaps in country music representation at the Grammys. Recording Academy chief Harvey Mason Jr. addresses the matter.

Harvey Mason Jr. has been the head of the Recording Academy for six years now, and it’s come during a tumultuous time for the Grammys and beyond—between the COVID pandemic, the Los Angeles wildfires, and a myriad of controversies surrounding nominees and winners, as well as that of the removal of Mason’s predecessor, Deborah Dugan. But it’s also come during a time of surging interest in country music, yet many fans have noticed a lack of country representation scoring wins at the ceremony.

Beyoncé scored a major win last year with her country-flavored album, Cowboy Carter, but her dominance in the genre was also extremely polarizing. Meanwhile, Morgan Wallen had one of the biggest albums of 2025 with I’m the Problem, but notably declined to submit any of his solo work for consideration. Similarly, Zach Bryan has also decided to continue his boycott against the Recording Academy.

This year, breakthrough country artists who dominated the charts in late 2025—Zach Top, Ella Langley, Megan Moroney—were entirely shut out of the 2026 Best New Artist nominations. That has raised some understandable questions about the validity of serious country stars competing in major Grammy categories.

In an interview with Variety, Harvey Mason Jr. addressed the “surprisingly low representation for country music in the big categories this year,” something that the outlet points out used to be the case with hip-hop.

“It’s really about what the voters choose to vote for every given year, and it’s cyclical,” said Mason, adding that he hopes the concerns around political influence don’t proliferate, “because it really is not that.”

“We will be looking into all our genre categories and the voters associated with them and making sure they are balanced, like we do every year. And after this year, we’ll do it again,” he explained. “It’s generally not based on who gets nominated, though, to tell you the truth. It’s based on, do we have a representative voting body of the different genres? And provided that we have the right percentage and ratios, then we’ll be in the right spot. We can’t tell what those people will vote for, but we can make sure that we have a representative voting body.”

Mason also said that he felt membership representation in the Recording Academy is “very well balanced,” but that it remains fluid and is subject to change “every week, every month, all year long.”

“We’re going to keep an eye on how we can make sure we’re being reflective of what’s going on in music, so from time to time, we’ll need to add more members in different genres—maybe there’ll be a category member, producer, or an engineer that we’ll need more of. And that’s work that we do literally 365 days of the year.”

While he wouldn’t outright state that a given year’s results change the way the Academy recruits, Mason did admit that it’s “more towards the underpinning of the process,” that it’s about the number of members they have that represent a genre, as opposed to specifically being based around outcomes.