Six female solo artists and an all-female group account for all but one of the 2024 Grammy nominations for album of the year. Only Jon Batiste’s World Music Radio kept male artists from being shut out in the top category this year.
This is the 12th time that female artists have dominated the album of the year nominations. This never happened between 1959 and 1991, but has happened frequently in recent years.
It happened for the first time in 1992, which is fittingly often referred to as the Year of the Woman, when four women were elected to the U.S. Senate for the first time, joining the two that were already there.
This year’s Grammy nominees for album of the year include boygenius, the acclaimed trio which consists of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, for their debut album The Record, as well as Miley Cyrus’ Endless Summer Vacation, Lana Del Rey’s Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, Janelle Monáe‘s The Age of Pleasure, Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts, Taylor Swift’s Midnights and SZA’s SOS.
It’s Swift’s sixth nomination in this category, which puts her in a tie with Barbra Streisand for the most nominations by a female artist. It’s the second nomination in the category for Del Rey, Monáe and Rodrigo, and the first for boygenius, Cyrus and SZA.
Here are all the times that female artists have outperformed male artists in the album of the year nominations. The years shown are the years of the Grammy ceremonies.
(Some may wonder why I don’t include 1997, when the album of the year nominees consisted of one album by a female artist (Celine Dion’s Falling Into You, which won), one album by a male artist (Beck’s Odelay), the all-female Waiting to Exhale soundtrack and two albums by mixed-gender groups (Fugees’ The Score and The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness). Wouldn’t the Exhale soundtrack make this a female-dominated roster? You’d think so, but no: The only person who was nominated for that soundtrack in this category was Babyface, who wrote and produced the album.)
