Lil Nas X, Gunna and Victoria Monet are among 2,321 people who have been invited to join the Recording Academy. That is nearly 1,000 more invitations than the academy issued last year, when it invited 1,340 new members. (Of those, 743 took the academy up on its offer.)Kelley Purcell, the academy’s senior director, member outreach, notes that, unlike last year, the academy had a full year to work on its member class.
Last year, in the first year of its new, peer-review membership model, it had just seven months, from the launch in November 2018 to the announcement of the 2019 invitations on June 6, 2019.This year’s "freshman class," as the academy calls it, is 48% female (compared to 49% in last year’s freshman class invites), 21% African.
Read more on billboard.com