Latin Grammys Finally Add Contemporary Mexican Music Album Category

Peso Pluma, Eslabon Armado, Junior H, and other artists will now have a better chance of taking home Latin Grammys thanks to changes the Latin Recording Academy has made to its eligibility guidelines, ahead of the 25th annual edition of the awards show.

The organization has created a new category called Best Contemporary Mexican Music Album (Regional-Mexican Field), which will recognize “vocal or instrumental albums of Contemporary Regional Mexican Music, in Spanish,” according to the Academy. More than half of the album must contain new material, and 60 percent of it should maintain “the essence of the genres of Regional Mexican Music.”

The change will now open up the Latin Grammys to recognizing corridos tumbados. An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times last year bemoaned the exclusion of Rancho Humilde, a label that specializes in corridos tumbados and puts out records by Junior H and Natanael Cano. But it did praise Pluma’s recognition.

Additionally, the Academy has renamed its Best MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) to become MABP (Música Afro Portuguesa-Brasileira). And it added a new category in the electronic field: Best Latin Electronic Music Performance. To be eligible, more than half of an album should be Latin electronic music, and samples should not represent more than a quarter of the lyrics, as well as other qualifications.

The Academy also made minor tweaks to its definition of what qualifies for the singer-songwriter field (60 percent of tracks must be in Spanish, Portuguese, or other native dialect) and to the long-form video category, reducing the length of a film from 20 minutes to 12.

The Latin Recording Academy has not yet set when it will announce nominations or hold the 25th Annual Latin Grammys; both will likely occur in the fall. To qualify for an award, a release must have come out between June 1, 2023, and May 31, 2024, so these changes might prove to be a boon to records that haven’t even come out yet.