Daily Edit | Jan 29

At least most of the time, it probably feels pretty good to be fakemink right now. Over the past year or so, the young UK rapper's dizzying, delightfully lo-fi tracks have lifted him out of the underground, to the point where he's hanging out with his rage forebears like Playboi Carti, playing Camp Flog Gnaw, and getting co-signs from those not personally involved in the hip-hop world. He's starting off 2026 strong with a new mixtape called The Boy Who Cried Terrified, which is out today. -Stereogum

1 / 29 / 2026

Headlines

• EMPIRE is playing the long game – Celebrating 15 years in the game, the community-focused San Francisco music company continues to expand while maintaining their artist-first mentality [flood]
  

• V&A East Museum announces first landmark exhibition, The Music is Black: a British Story [lobf]
  

• How Jody Gerson has made publishing ‘the hot business’ right now [billboard pro]
  

• Blame this man for auto-tune [ironic sans]

GETTING TO THE GRAMMYs

With the 68^th annual GRAMMY Awards coming up this weekend, we thought this would be a good time to take a look at how we got here. This week, we’ll highlight and unpack several key phases of the GRAMMY process to help give a bit of context to a very dense and slightly-confusing rulebook.

Today, we’ll look at the Academy’s Category Screening process — why it exists and how it operates

This series is a distillation of The Recording Academy’s current rulebook - which is publicly available here.

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CATEGORY SCREENING
why it exists and how it operates

Before the first round ballot goes out, submissions in most categories must pass through what the Academy’s Category Screening process — a series of genre-specific committees charged with ensuring that each song/album is competing in its most appropriate genre.

Essentially how this process works is:

1. Each committee of genre experts reviews the tracks and albums that have been submitted into their respective genre field

2. As a group, they listen and can vote to either accept the entry, or propose moving it to another genre that they feel is more appropriate/in line with the Academy’s category definitions (outlined in the rulebook linked above)

3. From there, the committee whose genre it was sent to reviews the submission and then votes to either accept, move elsewhere, or send back.

At the end of the day, all entries must find a home so the Academy utilizes what they call a ‘CORE committee’ to adjudicate situations where the dedicated genre committees cannot agree where to categorize a submitted recording.

To illustrate this process, it would be useful to walk through a hypothetical Screening example:

• Let’s just say that Chris Stapleton submitted “White Horse” in Rock Performance and Rock Song.
  

• The Rock Screening committee listens to it and thinks it isn’t consistent with what is being accepted into Rock so they send it to the Country committee to review, thinking it’s perhaps more appropriate there.
  

• From there, the Country committee will review the submission and either choose to accept the entry or send it elsewhere/back to Rock.
  

• If neither the Rock or Country committee accepts the entry, it goes to the CORE committee to make a final decision.
  

• It’s worth noting that a track’s Performance and Song entries must travel together throughout the Screening process. If this hypothetical situation with Stapleton were to play out and Country accepted the track, the entries would change from:
  
  Rock Performance → Country Solo Performance

  Rock Song → Country Song

Something that makes this process a little tricky is that there isn’t perfect parity across the genre categories — some genres have:

1. both a Performance and a Song category (Rock, Country, Rap, etc.)

2. only a Performance category (Pop, Alternative, Metal, etc.)

3. Performance and Song combined into a single category (Gospel, CCM, etc.)

Since this format can complicate how entries move to different genres, these situations are perhaps best explained visually:

Example 1: A recording is either accepted by the Rock committee, or rejected and ultimately accepted by a genre with both a Performance and Song category

Example 2: A recording is either accepted by the Rock committee, or rejected and ultimately accepted by a genre with only a Performance category. Since there is no available Song category within this genre, the Song entry is moved to Song of the Year.

Example 3: A recording is either accepted by the Rock committee, or rejected and ultimately accepted by a genre that consolidates Song and Performance into a single category.

Miscellaneous notes

• It’s important to note that each individual entry is judged in a vacuum, so that’s why sometimes you’ll see situations where an artist’s album is in one genre category but a track from that same album could appear in a different genre category. 
  

• In situations where a committee is unsure whether to move a recording to another genre, artist intent (indicated by where the recording was submitted) is considered to be the deciding factor for final category placement. A recording must receive a supermajority (2/3 vote) before being moved to a category different from where it was entered.

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