Harvey Mason, the Grammy CEO, was recently asked why Essence was not nominated for a Record of the Year award in a recent interview with Billboard. Billboard published the interview on Wednesday, November 24th, 2021.

For the first time in 27 years, the Grammy nominees are determined solely by the voting members of the Grammy committee, with no input from the review committee. When asked if he was confidence in the voting committee’s capacity to deliver without oversight, the Grammy CEO stated, “I am confident in the ability of the voting committee to deliver without supervision.”

Mason said: I wasn’t worried. I had the impression that we had done a lot of important work on our membership. We’ve done a lot of outreach to different communities that we felt were underrepresented in our voting membership. So I thought the timing was right for our membership to be able to directly choose who the nominees were. That is why we felt comfortable removing the nominations review committees at the time.