LOS ANGELES — The 66th Grammy Awards will take place Feb. 4 in a ceremony at Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles, organizers said Thursday. Nominations for music's most prestigious awards show will be revealed Nov. 10.
The announcement from the Recording Academy, which presents the annual Grammys, follows news of several rule changes set to be instituted for the 2024 ceremony, which will be broadcast live on CBS and will stream on Paramount+.
After two years in which 10 nominees were allowed into each of the show's top categories — album, record and song of the year, as well as best new artist — the 66th Grammys will reduce the number of nominees for each prize to eight. The academy will also hand out three new awards for best African music performance, best pop dance recording and best alternative jazz album, bringing the total number of categories to 94.
To be eligible for nomination for next year's prizes, an album or song must have been released between Oct. 1, 2022, and Sept. 15, 2023 — an unusual window of 11 and a half months compared with the 12-month period used for this year's show.
Among the presumptive front-runners for album of the year are Taylor Swift's "Midnights" and SZA's "SOS," both critical successes and commercial blockbusters; other LPs in the early running include "The Record" by Boygenius and Foo Fighters' "But Here We Are," which addresses the 2022 death of that band's longtime drummer, Taylor Hawkins.
Miley Cyrus' chart-topping "Flowers" is likely to earn nods for record and song of the year, while Peso Pluma may ride the explosion of regional Mexican music to a best new artist nomination. It remains to be seen whether the Recording Academy will honor country star Morgan Wallen, who has 2023's most successful LP by far with "One Thing at a Time," as well as a single, "Last Night," currently in its 12th week atop Billboard's Hot 100. Wallen was shut out at the 65th Grammys for the second year in a row after being caught on tape drunkenly using the N-word to refer to a friend back in 2021.
Big winners at the most recent Grammys, which took place in February, included Harry Styles, who took album of the year with "Harry's House"; Lizzo's "About Damn Time," which was named record of the year; Bonnie Raitt, whose "Just Like That" won song of the year; and jazz singer Samara Joy, named best new artist.
Overnight ratings for the show were up 30% from 2022, with about 12.5 million viewers.
