Daily Edit | Jan 30

Love Rarely have shared the details of their upcoming debut album, and shared a new track, too, for good measure.

The song is ‘Will’, a jangly, jagged and jostling piece of post-hardcore vibrancy that showcases both the harsh and heavenly parts of their sound.

Guitarist Dan Dewsnap had this to say about the album, revealing, “‘Pain Travels’ takes you on a journey of attempting to cope with life when you might not have been dealt the best hand. It ended up being a deeper and darker record than we initially thought it would be, but that speaks to the authenticity on show. There’s a lot of positivity too. We’re basically saying things have been tough, but it’s going to be okay.” -Rock Sound

1 / 30 / 2026

Headlines

• The Billboard Power 100 [billboard]
  

• Stationhead and Mellomanic merge, UMG invests in ‘ultimate’ direct-to-fan platform [billboard pro]
  

• ‘It has an accuracy of 99.8%’: Deezer makes it’s AI-detection tool available to rival streaming platforms to combat fake content – but will services like Spotify take up the offer? [tech radar]
  

• Could an upload fee help fix music streaming? [forbes]
  

• Spotify rolls out group chats [tech crunch]

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’ve highlighted and unpacked 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 Voting process — how the ballot is structured and some key differences between the first and second ballots.

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

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VOTING
structure and category-specific formats

First round ballot 

Once all of the entries are screened into their final category homes, the first round ballot will go live and can be accessed in each voter’s Academy member dashboard.

Looking at the ballot, you’ll see that the GRAMMYs employ what they call a “10:3” voting structure, a system where each voter can vote in up to ten categories across three genre fields (+ all six General field categories). This structure is designed to help ensure that people are choosing to vote in genre fields that they specialize and actively work in. 

On the first round ballot, each voter can make up to 5 selections per category. These choices are unranked and unweighted so it doesn’t matter in which order they are chosen.

Craft committees

While the Academy dissolved its Nomination Review committees several years ago, it has continued to employ specialized committees to determine the nominations in its Craft categories.

There are essentially two formats to these committees: 

1. The first is a hybrid of the traditional format where all eligible submissions go on the first ballot and are voted on by the general membership. From there, a specialized Craft committee for each category will review a list of the top 30 selections, discussing and evaluating their merit relative to the Craft they’re under consideration for. These are then voted on by the committee members via a confidential and individual ballot — the top 5 vote receivers becoming each category’s nominations.
   
   Categories that fall into this format include: Instrumental Composition, Instrumental or A Cappella Arrangement, Instrumental Arrangement with Vocals, Producer of the Year; Non-Classical, Songwriter of the Year; Non-Classical.

2. The other format these Craft categories employ is one where submissions in these categories do not appear on the first ballot. Instead, a committee for each category convenes and reviews/analyzes each submission as a group. At the conclusion of the meeting, the committee members then vote to determine the category’s five nominations.
   
   Categories that fall into this format include: Immersive, Engineering; Non-Classical, Historical Album, Recording Package, Album Cover, and Album Notes. 

It’s important to reiterate here that while these committees discuss each project as a group, they are voting on individual and private ballots. Additionally, the Academy mandates that at least 25% of each committee must turn over each year. 

Nominations Announcement

Once the first round ballot closes and the votes are tallied up by The Academy’s independent accounting firm the nominations for each category are determined and announced. As you’ll notice, the General field categories each have 8 nominations while the others only have 5 each. In the event of a tie, the Academy will typically include the ties so that’s why sometimes you’ll see additional nominations in a given category. 

Second round ballot

The primary difference between the first and second ballot is that on the second, each voter is limited to only one choice per category. As you’ll remember from earlier, each voter may make up to five selections per category on the first round ballot. 

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