Behind The GRAMMYs: 2025

Happy Tuesday,

This is the second special edition¹ of New Industry Friday digging into the data behind the GRAMMY nominations for 2025.

Coming up in this edition…

• Best New Artist, but new to who?

• Are UMG playing a different game entirely?

• Interscope, Red Light and CAA top the charts. Who else ranked?

• Is there actually a gender… balance?

👋 there’s lots of charts and data so if you’d prefer you can read this online.

⚠️ Read this first

This analysis focuses on 26 key GRAMMY categories, including high-profile awards and mainstream genres. Using ROSTR’s unique data, we analyze each nominee’s management, label, and agency to spotlight industry players and trends. While not exhaustive, this selection offers a strong sample of GRAMMY patterns. For more info, click here.

Best New Artist: but new to who?

The Recording Academy bases eligibility for Best New Artist (BNA) on when an artist “achieved a breakthrough into the public consciousness.”

Still, this year the average amount of time between a nominee’s debut release and nomination was… 7.8 years. This year, 3 of the nominees released their debuts more than a decade ago.

It’s not just an anomaly – this trend has been building since the 2010s. In the 2000s, the average Best New Artist nominee had been active for just over 2 years. By the 2010s, that number rose to 4 years, and in the first half of this decade, nominees have typically been active for 6 years before receiving a nomination.

💡 In the future, we might do a special looking into the data and the potential reasons behind this trend. In the meantime, if you have thoughts on why this is happening drop a comment at the end.

Are UMG playing a different game entirely?

Of the 26 awards we analyzed, Universal Music Group dominated with 50% of all nominations. Independents followed with nearly a quarter (22%), while the other major labels lagged significantly behind: Sony Music Group at 17% and Warner Music Group at 11%.

When looking at nominated artists (as opposed to total nominations), Independents hold a bit more ground at 26%, closing the gap slightly with UMG at 45%. However, the numbers remain similar overall.

This isn’t just a case of a few high-performing artists inflating the count - it’s clear dominance. UMG has 50% more nominated artists than Sony and WMG combined.

This isn’t a spike, and it isn’t new. The chart below shows UMG’s dominance across the biggest awards since the year 2000 - a lead that continues to accelerate, outpacing both the other majors and independents.

The Rankings

The labels, agencies and artist management companies with the most nominations and artists. For more info on how we did this, click here.

UMG has 7 of the top 10 most nominated labels

Unsurprisingly, given their dominance, UMG labels make up 7 of the top 10 most nominated labels. Interscope leads with 21 nominations in total across 9 different artists. Republic (17 nominations) are followed by Island (13).

RCA (10), Columbia (7), and Epic (5) rep Sony.

Atlantic (9) is the only Warner label in the top 10.

No independents in the Top 10 but EMPIRE were at #11.

Familiar faces top the management rankings

Red Light, who have by far the largest roster in the world (479 artists 😮), lead with 13 nominations across 6 artists (Sabrina Carpenter, Chris Stapleton, Brittany Howard, Lainey Wilson, The Black Crowes, The Black Keys).

Brandon Creed’s Good World, in their first GRAMMY season after the split from Full Stop, come in second with 9 nominations from 4 artists (Charli xcx, Ariana Grande, Tame Impala, Troye Sivan).

State of the Art have 8 nominations from 3 artists (Chappell Roan, Lucky Daye, Coco Jones). One of those artists Chappell Roan, recently split with the company but we’ve kept them in here given they were management for the period of submission.

CAA lead, major agencies dominate

The 4 major agencies (CAA, WME, Wass, UTA) represent ~70% of the artists nominated across these 26 categories, and 75% of nominations.

CAA (24 artists, 57 noms) have a big lead; they rep 5 of the 10 most nominated artists (Beyoncé, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx, Post Malone, Shaboozey).

Wasserman (35 noms, 19 artists) have the second most nominations, WME (33 noms, 20 artists) have the second most artists nominated.

There’s actually a gender… balance?

Across the 26 awards we analyzed, nominees were pretty balanced along gender lines, at lease for male and female artists.

50.5% of nominees were male, 48.2% were female. Mixed groups accounted for 1.4%. As far as we know, none of the nominees in the categories we tracked identify as non-binary.

Some of the most prominent awards are dominated by female artists. Album of The Year (80%). Record of The Year (76%). Song of the Year (69%). Then Best R&B Song, Best Pop Album and Best Pop Solo Performance all are 100% female artists.

Male artists continue to dominate the non-pop specific genres including Best Album awards for Rap (87%), Rock (100%), and Dance/Electronic (100%).

That’s all for this special edition. We may come back with another edition if there’s some interesting stories to explore after the awards are handed out.

In the meantime, please check out our referral sweepstakes for sharing New Industry Friday. And, if you have artists nominated for a GRAMMY get in touch about For Your Consideration campaigns across The ROSTR Group ([email protected]).

Thanks for reading 🙏