Streaming Only Music Eligible for a Grammy Award Starting Next Year

Since the release and subsequent rise in popularity of music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, a lot of previously unknown artists have become extremely prevalent not only in the United States, but internationally as well. Now, these artists will get rewarded for their efforts by not only their music sales, but potentially with a Grammy Award as well.

According to reports from PC Mag, the Recording Academy has recently announced that previously streaming-only songs are now considered for a Grammy Award effective immediately for their next annual ceremony at the 59th Grammy Awards to take place on February 12, 2017. This means that the number of potential nominees for different Grammy categories has just gotten a whole lot bigger.

Prior to this, only songs that are made "commercially available via general distribution or digital recordings/downloads" were eligible to be nominated for a Grammy award according to the official eligibility guidelines provided by the Recording Academy. Now any songs released "via brick and mortar, third-party online retailers, and/or applicable digital streaming services" are eligible.

This makes it significantly easy for almost anyone to win a Grammy award since it only takes a few days up to a few weeks for a musician to upload his or her original work to Spotify. Even the Spotify community has found different ways to upload a user's own music to the music streaming platform. There are over a dozen services, which allow users to do this.

This news comes in light of the news that the streaming revenues from the Warner Music Group had surpassed the revenues of their physical sales. What this means is that they make more money from streaming music compared to selling real world albums or their digital sales. This is an exciting development for any aspiring musicians out there.