Zach Bryan refuses to submit for the 2025 Grammys

Zach Bryan, one of the most commercially successful music artists working today, is nowhere to be found on the massive ballot just sent out to Grammy voters after he refused to submit his work for consideration in any category.

A search of the online ballot, which is only available to members of the Recording Academy and not to the general public, revealed that Bryan’s name does not appear among the thousands of candidates whose works were nominated for the Record of the Year, Album of the Year awards. or “Song” were submitted of the year. His albums or songs are also not listed in the rock, country or Americana categories, the areas in which the genre-bending superstar would most likely compete.

Sources confirm that Bryan decided not to submit this year because he felt he wasn’t comfortable with award shows making music competitive.

That would reflect Bryan’s notoriously mercurial attitude toward the music industry in general, although he hasn’t refused to submit his work for awards in the past.

A boycott by Bryan puts him in the select company of a few other superstars who have chosen to sit out the process, most notably The Weeknd and Drake. But while The Weeknd made his decision after being completely shut out of the nominations the year “Blinding Lights” exploded, Bryan decided to sit it out after actually winning a Grammy earlier this year.

Bryan won his 2024 Grammy, his first, for “I Remember Everything,” a duet with Kacey Musgraves that earned him the award for best country duo/group performance. He was nominated four times in total, three of them last year and one the year before. All four nods came from country music, although the singer said he doesn’t consider himself exclusively a country artist.

Fans have complained that his awards and nominations were nowhere near his level of fame. Despite being by far one of the biggest artists to break out in the last five years, Bryan, to the surprise or dismay of many, did not receive a nomination for Best New Artist at the Grammys while he was eligible.

His track record at the CMA Awards is also limited, with only two nominations to date. In 2023, he was nominated for, but did not win, the Best New Artist award, his only award that year. He again received a nomination for Musical Event of the Year for the upcoming 2024 CMAs for the duet with Musgraves. Bryan doesn’t promote his songs on country radio, which explains his low CMA haul.

He received a whopping 16 nominations for a non-industry show, the People’s Choice Country Awards, and finally won one of them when the show aired two weeks ago.

While it seems possible that Bryan holds a grudge against the Grammys for not nominating him in bigger and better categories in the past, a boycott of the process certainly fits with the star’s decision to further retreat from what he is considered to be the machinery of the music industry – As he already does by asking his label Warner not to promote his songs in any format.

Bryan continues to prove himself a superstar by other measures of success. The latest Billboard Boxscore chart shows the singer topping the monthly gross concert rankings with grosses of a staggering $93.2 million for the month of August alone, representing earnings from 467,000 tickets sold for 13 shows, 10 of which took place in stadiums. A two-day stand in Philadelphia alone brought in $20.7 million.

He has three albums in the top 20 on the current Billboard 200, including his latest release, “The Great American Bar Scene,” which is at No. 11. The self-titled “Zach Bryan” is at No. 17 and “American Heartbreak,” an album that came out more than two years ago, remains at No. 18 on the chart.

In September, Bryan sparked controversy when he made a joking comment on X about preferring Kanye West to Taylor Swift. After much pushback from Swifties, he subsequently apologized for the remark, which he said he made while drunk, and deactivated his account on the app, saying his activities there were doing him more harm than good. He continues to post on Instagram, where he expressed his numerous mea culpas for the Ye/Swift tweet.

With additional reporting by Steven J. Horowitz.