Put Monday, November 16, on the calendar if you follow new music closely. That is when the Recording Academy will reveal the nominations for the 69th Grammy Awards, setting up months of argument about the artists who made the cut and the ones who did not.
The official announcement is scheduled to begin at 4:45 a.m. Pacific, or 7:45 a.m. Eastern. For listeners in Montana, that is 5:45 a.m. Mountain Time. It will stream on Grammy.com and the Recording Academy’s official YouTube channel. The complete nominations list is expected to appear on Grammy.com afterward.
A new network and new award categories
The actual Grammy ceremony is set for Sunday, February 7, 2027, at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. The broadcast will appear on ABC, Disney+ and Hulu, marking a significant distribution change for one of the music industry’s most watched annual events.
There are 100 categories scheduled for the 2027 ceremony. Five are new, according to the Academy. Among those are Best Asian Pop Music Performance and Best R&B Collaboration or Duo/Group Performance. Their addition acknowledges how quickly the musical map has been changing, even if an awards category cannot capture everything happening within a genre.
The qualifying release period ran from August 31, 2025, through August 28, 2026. That detail is worth remembering when an apparently obvious late-year release is absent from the ballot. Eligibility is not simply a matter of which song is popular when the nominations come out.
Why listeners should look beyond the headline races
Much of the conversation will center on Album, Record and Song of the Year. The more revealing nominations can often be found deeper in the list: regional styles, production, traditional forms, roots genres, instrumental work and recordings that may never dominate commercial radio.
For a station that moves between hip-hop, R&B, country, rock and powwow music, that range matters. Artists who reach a small but devoted audience are part of the musical year too. Awards can bring them new listeners, though they are hardly the final measure of good music.
The nominees have not yet been announced as of October 26. Any circulating ‘winner’ lists or supposed final ballots should be treated with caution. KHEW listeners can use the Academy’s official feed for confirmation and then make their own judgment about who deserved recognition.
Sources: Recording Academy nominations guide and ceremony announcement.
