How Big Is the Grammys’ Country Music Problem?

The failure of the Grammys to nominate Megan Moroney, Ella Langley or Zach Top for best new artist points to the larger issue of country being shut out of any nominations in the Big Four, for only the third time this century. It’s not because the genre isn’t red-hot.

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When it comes to the Grammys and the CMA Awards, the twain used to meet, at least sometimes. As in: Once upon a time, Shania Twain — and others of her ilk — could earn top nominations for both shows. But those days seem to be gone for country music, when it comes to Grammy recognition in the categories that are generally referred to as the Big Four. As a genre, country appears to be getting ghosted by Grammy voters.

For 2025, there are a total of 32 nominations spread across those top four categories. The amount of recognition for country or country-adjacent artists among those 32 nods: zero.

Now, country is not alone in failing to earn a seat at the big kids’ table. Rock could sidle up next to country at the bar, drink sloshing in hand, and slur, “Welcome to the club.” There’s a difference, of course: Not even the most diehard defender would argue that rock ‘n’ roll, however popular its oldies are, has experienced a major commercial renaisance since the turn of the century, whereas both anecdotal evidence and hard data make it clear that country is an already massive genre that is experiencing significant growth spurts every year, thanks to infusions of fresh blood among both the artists and audience.

So maybe it’s the quality, then? Grammy voters are just becoming more discerning, in quietly deciding nothing Nashville had to offer met the impossibly high standard of an “Ordinary” or a “Swag”?

Some will surely make that argument. But for the sake of arguing, let’s take a look at the field for next week’s CMA Awards. Most country-savvy commentators who’ve looked at the slate of nominees for the CMAs have remarked on the cred factor uniting the top nomineet. Tied for the most nominations with six each are three powerful and almost universally acclaimed young figures — Lainey Wilson, Megan Moroney and Ella Langley — who are together establishing that what women in the genre lack (regrettably) in sheer numbers, they’re making up for in sheer quality. Close behind this mini-murderer’s row of female artists with four nods is Zach Top, a neotraditionalist who’s found favor across basically all country quadrants.

Moroney, Langley and Top were all eligible for best new artist, and even considered frontrunners for some of those eight slots. But, faced with all that critically acclaimed, commercially hot talent, what could the Recording Academy do but take a quick look and conclude:

“Nah, thanks… we’re good.”

You might be able to write this shutout off as an aberration. After all, it’s happened twice before, in the 21st century, in 2018 and 2004, that no projects with even a tenuous connection to country got a nomination in the top four. But it would be easier to believe that it’s just a passing, cyclical thing if the representation hadn’t been growing noticeably worse in recent years in key categories.

Consider that even Lainey Wilson, who may well stand as country’s greatest ambassador to the world for a generation to come, was never able to land a best new artist nomination, let along album, record or song of the year. She would have first been a contender in 2022, when both the CMAs and ACMs gave her their new artist prize. She was more seriously considered a frontrunner in the years 2023 and 2024, only to again come up MIA in BNA. In 2024, she did win a country Grammy, rendering her ineligible for best new artist after that and sparing us the embarrassment of seeing her passed over for the BNA category for a fourth year.

All the other issues we could raise may have arguments or counterarguments about merit, but if you have several shots at nominating Lainey Wilson for best new artist and whiff at that repeatedly, there may be an institutional problem.

And best new artist is the category that was most likely to field at least one country candidate among the Big Four, in the last couple of decades, up until this year. The dearth of Nashville has been more noticeable in the other three. In record of the year, for instance, there has only been one country song nominated since Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now” won in 2011, and that was Lil Nas X’s and Billy Ray Cyrus’ rather aberrational “Old Town Road” in 2020.

In album of the year, the pickins have been nearly as slim. Beyonce’s “Cowboy Carter” did win in 2025, if you consider that a country album. (I definitely did, even if she didn’t —having officially declared that it was “a ‘Beyoncé’ album, not a country album,” a statement that probably let the CMAs off the hook for not nominating it, even if that piece of rhetoric shouldn’t have been taken at face value.) Prior to that, we also had a 2019 win for Kacey Musgraves’ “Golden Hour,” which some consider her first post-mainstream-country album, preceded by a 2017 nomination for Sturgill Simpson’s “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth,” his first not-really-country-at-all album. You may notice a pattern there: The last time someone who considers himself a straight-on country artist was nominated for a straight-on country album was 10 years ago, with Chris Stapleton’s “Traveller.” And listen, it’s fine, even commendable, maybe, that the Grammys would favor stuff on the very edges of country rather than conventional radio fare. But, as it turns out, in these top categories it’s just been a very short trip from favoring alt-country to favoring no country.

But here’s an opposing thought, for a second: Downballot, in the actual country categories and the adjacent ones like American roots, Americana, folk and bluegrass, the Recording Academy tends to do just fine, or close enough to fine. That was true when there were committee picks figuring into the mix, and true since those were done away with. The country Grammy categories have had their own peculiarities — like Willie Nelson’s seeming inability to not get nominated for every semiannual album he puts out — but there’s rarely anything nominated in those divisions that doesn’t represent something close to a standard of excellence.

And the Academy actually made a great institutional choice this year, by splitting what was previously a single country category in two. Best country album has now been subdivided into best contemporary country album and best traditional country album, which is only catching up with what already exists over in the R&B field. (There were some cynics who believed the Grammys were creating the traditional country category just to have a place where Beyonce couldn’t win, after some upset that she bested country’s in-the-pocket contenders last year. History lends itself to those kinds of suspicions, regardless of what is actually happening in board meetings. In any case, ironically, the lone artist-of-color in either country album division was Charley Crockett… in traditional country.)

That kind of move is an indication that the Nashville wing of the Recording Academy is taken seriously by toppers at the overall org, and that the Grammys’ leaders want to do right by country. No doubt there are conversations going on about how to get at least some token representation in the top categories for one of music’s hottest genres.

Are the problems intractible, though? Country is in an odd situation where it can claim the hottest star in music who is not named Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, yet he declared this year that he is not submitting himself at all for the Grammys, implicitly suggesting that he believes his brand of country is never going to find the favor of voters he probably considers elitist. So it’s mostly country at the sub-blockbuster level that voters will have to be considering — thus making it theoretically easier for genre acts to slip in to best new artist … although it’s not exactly like Lainey Wilson is too obscure or underperforming to make it in for record or album.

Then there’s the question of how much more voter expansion is possible, if Nashville has already come close to maxing out in its signup efforts. The growth is coming most of all in the outreach to the Latin music world, with everyone who is a voter for the Latin Grammys having been invited to come aboard the mothership as well. That’s been an important development (here’s to Bad Bunny, restored to the Big Four after a couple of years off) and will continue to inspire a lot more passion, understandably, than any notion that the Academy needs to scour the corners of Music City to sign up more of the types of people who were favored by the system when nods were plentiful in past decades. (Which is not to say that country isn’t far more diverse than generally represented, especially in its fan base and in its working population in Nashville, but the demographic perception is not altogether divorced from the reality.)

Part of the problem may be a lack of passion about the Grammys in some Music Row circles themselves, because of lingering hurt feelings over past shutouts of established artists in the country categories, or — perhaps more importantly — because of the CMAs and ACMs being their real focus of attention. No other genre has its own awards show with an impact rivaling either of those, so it’s easy to understand why there’s no flood of outrage if country comes up short at the Grammys when that’s not their main yardstick anyway. Pop and R&B stars are just always going to take a Grammy snub more personally than folks in country, who may have been trained to look at the Grammys overlooking them and shrug, “It’s Chinatown, Jake.”

So it may be more important to the Grammys than it is to the country community that country gets a fairer shot, if only to reflect reality in hoping that one of the biggest and fastest-growing genres would get at least one token nomination out of 32. If the average Academy voter is going to be too disinterested in country to even check out some of its brighter stars, as we can guess might be the case, there may still be some room to add to the rolls a few more members who’ve heard and can vouch for a Lainey Wilson, at some point in her career, in the Big Four.

And there is an important demographic development happening in country that the Grammys should be finding a way to applaud: the reemergence of women as a dominant creative force in the field. If you’ve been to anything like a recent sold-out Megan Moroney concert and seen thousands of women screaming their lungs out, despite having been given every sign over the years that their voices aren’t as important, you’d know this is no small breakthrough, creatively, commercially or culturally. It shouldn’t be the CMAs alone recognizing that Moroney, Langley and Wilson are killing it right now, amid a deck that has been stacked against them. Don’t fence them out.