Here's why The Grammys have changed the name of Best World Music Album category to Global Music Album
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The Grammys announced several changes to its nominations process earlier.
Following the footsteps of The Academy, The Recording Academy aka The Grammys have now changed the name of a popular category award. Showing more cultural sensitivity, they have changed the name of its Best World Music Album to Best Global Music Album.
Before this, Oscars had changed the name of an important category award -- Best Foreign Film to Best International Feature Film. Last year, Korean film ‘Parasite’ became the first film to win under that category. It went on to bag the prestigious Best Picture Oscar too.
The Recording Academy announced the name change on November 2. In a statement, the Recording Academy said: “As we continue to embrace a truly global mindset, we update our language to reflect a more appropriate categorization that seeks to engage and celebrate the current scope of music from around the world.
“Over the summer we held discussions with artists, ethnomusicologists, and linguists from around the world who determined that there was an opportunity to update the best world music album category toward a more relevant, modern, and inclusive term...The change symbolizes a departure from the connotations of colonialism, folk, and ‘non-American’ that the former term embodied while adapting to current listening trends and cultural evolution among the diverse communities it may represent.”
This is how they describe the new category: “This category recognizes excellence in albums of world music, including recordings of international non-Western classical music, international non-American and non-British traditional folk music, international cross-cultural music based on the previously mentioned genres as well as international recordings of world beat, world jazz (with a higher percentage of world than jazz music), world pop and cross-cultural music. Albums of reggae, Latin or European pop music aren’t eligible in this category and should be entered in other categories as appropriate.”
The Grammys announced several changes to its nominations process earlier.