Grammy Awards add new category to throw Asian pop acts a consolation prize and expect them to be grateful

The Recording Academy recently announced the creation of five new categories for the 2027 edition of the Grammy Awards, including one relevant to this blog in Best Asian Pop Music Performance, which will “recognize artistic excellence in Asian pop music performances originating from or widely recognized within Asian markets, including K-pop, J-pop and C-pop recordings that feature meaningful use of one or more Asian languages.“

After years of K-pop assaulting the Grammys and seemingly being on the verge of breaking through for a main award, they finally were recognized, though amusingly through K-Pop Demon Hunters and “GOLDEN”. The PR justification for this will be that since Asian pop is growing in notoriety, they are finding away to give the best Asian pop act a Grammy, which doesn’t take them out of the running for the major awards. How it seems everybody expects it to go is that they were tired of having to pretend to take Asian pop acts seriously and even entertain the idea of giving them one of the major awards, so now they can just throw this to whichever act is the hottest that year and move on.

The “here then, take it, fuck” of the music elites.

While I’d love to find a contrarian angle here, the Academy were always moving in this direction. Back in 2024, there were reports of them starting up an Asian Grammy Awards, not unlike the Latin Grammy Awards. I feel about the same as I did then as well.

Needless to say, I’m inherently skeptical of the intent here given that it’s an awards show, but even more so in this case that it’ll end up being anything but dominated by artists and companies from countries that would simply increase industry profits the most — and of course those with the most ties to the Western market and companies. Not that it would differ much from the actual Grammy Awards in that sense, but I have to imagine the charade will look even worse as they try to group Asian music all together under one umbrella. And it’s not like this type of cynicism from me is even original either, as when I did even the lightest research (Wikipedia!) on existing regional awards, I found all these things have been expressed by Latin artists about the Latin Grammys already.

Same idea, smaller scale, and then still might do the Asian version of the whole thing anyway.