The Grammy-winning producer tells World Music Views that Jamaica’s biggest obstacle at music’s most prestigious awards may not be a lack of talent, but a lack of participation. As thousands of recordings compete for the attention of Recording Academy voters, Antaeus explains the machinery of Grammy campaigning, the importance of relationships and why dancehall needs a stronger institutional voice. He also reveals that Spice is preparing an album that will showcase a different side of the dancehall queen.
For Jamaican artists, the Grammy Awards have long represented both international validation and a recurring source of frustration. Each year, when the nominations are announced or the Best Reggae Album winner is revealed, debates erupt over whether the Recording Academy understands the music, whether dancehall is being overlooked and why some of Jamaica’s most celebrated performers fail to secure recognition.
But Grammy-winning producer Alexx Antaeus believes the conversation has been focused on the wrong end of the process.
In an exclusive interview with World Music Views, the producer, who calls both Jamaica and New York home, offered a candid assessment of the politics, relationships and institutional participation that influence how music reaches Grammy voters.
His central argument is: making a great record is only part of the work. Ensuring that the people who vote have actually heard it is another matter entirely.
“Number one, the voters have to know who the artist is and they have to listen to the album,” Antaeus explained. “You have to understand there’s over 24,000 submissions. It’s a human impossibility to listen to everything.”
The challenge is particularly acute for reggae and dancehall, genres whose cultural reach extends well beyond the relatively small community of Caribbean music professionals participating in the Recording Academy.
In his view, the Grammy campaign is not simply a matter of putting an album forward and waiting for the result. It is a sustained exercise in visibility, networking and persuasion.
“So how do they know about it? Social media, email blasts, events where people introduce their projects and you go around and you meet other voters and you introduce them to your artists.”
It is an account of the Grammys that sounds less like a straightforward contest of artistic merit and more like an industry-wide competition for attention.
And with thousands of recordings competing for that attention, personal relationships can become decisive in determining which projects voters encounter in the first place.
The problem of being heard
Antaeus pointed to Jamaican dancehall star Masicka as an example of the visibility challenge facing artists whose reputations at home may not automatically translate into familiarity among the Academy’s international membership.
“So when you have someone like Masicka, the voters don’t know Masicka,” he said.
“Unless Def Jam have some internal way of promoting it to the voters that I haven’t seen, how are the voters going to know about it?”
The point was not that Masicka lacks an audience or artistic credibility. Rather, Antaeus suggested that success within Jamaica’s music ecosystem does not necessarily guarantee recognition among the broader voting population.
“I know about it(Masicka’s album). A handful of Jamaican voters know about it because we know the music, we love the music.”
But the electorate extends far beyond Jamaica.
“It’s not only about the Caribbeans who vote in reggae, it’s also about can we get the guy from Colombia to support? Can we get the guy from England to support that might have never heard of dancehall music before?”
In that sense, Grammy campaigning becomes an exercise in crossing cultural and geographical boundaries.
A dancehall album might dominate conversations in Kingston and still be unfamiliar to a producer, engineer or songwriter in another country who is eligible to vote in the category.
Antaeus offered a recent example involving Jamaican recording artist Runkus, whom he had personally introduced to fellow Academy members during a visit to Los Angeles.
“I just got a message this morning from some people that I introduced Runkus to when we were out in LA, and they said, ‘Alex, this album is fire! I would have never heard it if you hadn’t introduced me to the guy and told me to listen to it.’”
He said similar messages continued to arrive.
“Would the voters have listened to that album if I hadn’t introduced Runkus to them? Probably not.”
The task, he agreed, is to get an album within the hearing and sight of Grammy voters, including those who do not ordinarily consume Jamaican music became Dancehall’s global popularity, measured through streams, concerts and cultural influence, is not necessarily reflected in the composition or listening habits of the Grammy electorate.
Jamaica wants Grammys. But where are its voters?
Antaeus was considerably more pointed when the conversation turned to Jamaican participation in the Recording Academy itself.
He argued that the country cannot reasonably expect greater influence over Grammy outcomes while many eligible music professionals remain outside the institution.
“A lot of Jamaicans and I would make it even bigger, Caribbeans, but I’ll focus on Jamaicans because I also call Jamaica home along with New York.”
“They want to win a Grammy, but they don’t want to put the work that comes with winning a Grammy, which is become a member of the Academy and get involved and know what is the proper way to submit and promote your project to stay within the Academy’s rules so other voters know about your project.”
His criticism was directed not only at artists but also at producers and other industry professionals who could potentially qualify for membership.
“So we need more Jamaicans to become members. I know so many producers and artists here that qualify to become members, and they just don’t care, but they’re crying about the Grammys, though.”
He went further, revealing that he had personally assisted prominent Jamaican producers in joining the Academy, only for some to subsequently let their memberships lapse.
“I have personally ensured that some big-name producers here in Jamaica became members in the past, and obviously I’m not gonna name who. Same people allowed the memberships to expire,” he said.
His rhetorical question was uncompromising.
“So whose fault is it? The Grammy people’s fault?”
For Antaeus, complaints about Grammy results are difficult to separate from the industry’s willingness to participate in the institution responsible for those decisions.
“People need to get involved if they want to have a say and not curse the Grammys when their favorite artists don’t win come February.”
The argument raises a larger question about Jamaican music’s relationship with international institutions.
Reggae and dancehall have exerted an influence on popular music far beyond Jamaica’s size, shaping hip-hop, electronic music, Afrobeats and contemporary pop. Yet cultural influence and institutional representation are different forms of power.
Antaeus believes the latter requires deliberate investment.
The SOJA controversy and the politics of representation
One of the most contentious Grammy results in recent reggae history came in 2022, when American band SOJA won Best Reggae Album for Beauty in the Silence, defeating a field that included Jamaican stars Spice, Sean Paul, Etana and Gramps Morgan, as well as Jesse Royal.
The result provoked criticism among Jamaican music fans, some of whom questioned how an American group could triumph over artists from reggae’s birthplace.
Antaeus sees that episode as an illustration of the problem.
“Prime example was the year that you had Spice, Shaggy and a few other big people nominated,” he recalled, referring to the controversial year.
“SOJA won. And non-Jamaican, the only non-Jamaican out of the five won. And Jamaicans went cr*zy because the non-Jamaican won reggae.”
His recollection of the nominees was imprecise, but his broader point concerned representation within the voting body.
“But whose fault was it? It’s the Jamaicans not getting involved so they can have enough votes.”
That assessment is necessarily more complicated than a simple question of nationality. Grammy voters are expected to assess eligible recordings on their merits, and membership does not guarantee support for artists from any particular country.
Nevertheless, Antaeus argues that a larger Jamaican presence would give the island’s music professionals greater influence within the Academy, including in discussions about the structure of the awards themselves.
He connected the membership issue directly to longstanding calls for dancehall to receive its own Grammy category.
“We need more Jamaicans to become members so the voice of dancehall can be bigger.”
For an industry that has spent decades debating whether dancehall should be recognised separately from reggae, the issue is not merely symbolic.
A dedicated category could provide another avenue of recognition for a genre whose sonic identity, commercial ecosystem and cultural influence have developed considerably since the establishment of the Best Reggae Album award.
But Antaeus’s message is that institutional change requires institutional participation.
The mathematics of Grammy voting
There is another, less political obstacle facing artists seeking Grammy recognition: the sheer volume of music.
During the interview, Antaeus discussed a reggae field containing 119 submitted albums and described the practical limits facing voters expected to consider recordings across several categories.
“Do you also think with 119 albums, Grammy voters are going to listen to all the albums?” he was asked by WMV.
“I think by now, you know, we’re already two days into voting,” he replied, referring to the voting period underway at the time of the interview.
“By now, most voters have a good idea of where they’re going because they’ve taken the time to listen to the projects that were recommended by their peers or projects that they already knew that they happened to know throughout the year.”
He was sceptical that voters could reasonably listen to every entry.
“Is everyone who votes in reggae, for example, going to listen to 119 albums? I doubt that. It’s not possible because we vote in 10 different categories.”
He continued:
“10 categories, 100, 200, 300 albums each, that’s too much music.”
The problem becomes even more pronounced in broader categories.
“Especially some other categories like global, I just mentioned where we have Spice, Global Performance, has 500 entries, over 500 entries. How are we going to listen to all that stuff?”
His answer revealed the importance of familiarity and professional recommendations.
“So, what do we listen to? The stuff we already know or the stuff that our peers recommend for us to listen?”
It is perhaps the most revealing observation of the interview.
For all the prestige associated with the Grammys, the process still depends on human attention, which is finite.
A recording’s journey from submission to serious consideration may therefore depend partly on whether someone within a voter’s professional circle recommends it.
The same dynamic is familiar in other cultural industries, from literary prizes to film awards. The volume of eligible work makes discovery an unavoidable part of the process, creating an advantage for artists and teams capable of sustaining visibility throughout the awards cycle.
That does not establish that Grammy votes are bought, predetermined or exchanged. It does, however, suggest that the competition begins well before a voter makes a final selection.
Understanding the rules
Antaeus also described how the Academy’s voting structure influences the categories in which members participate.
“Reggae is a category within a bigger, broader field,” he explained, describing its grouping alongside Latin, global, African and new age music.
He said voters had previously been subject to restrictions on the number of fields and categories in which they could vote.
“I can vote for 10 categories out of three fields,” he said, outlining the framework he had been accustomed to using.
He noted that the Academy had introduced an alternative voting arrangement for the cycle being discussed, allowing participation in as many as 15 categories without the same field restriction, although he declined to unpack its complexities during the interview.
The technical details matter because Grammy voting is governed by eligibility and participation rules that can change between awards cycles.
For Jamaican artists and producers, Antaeus believes understanding those rules is an essential part of competing effectively.
It is not enough to submit a project. Artists and their teams need to know where it belongs, how it can be presented to voters, and what forms of promotion are permitted.
The message is particularly relevant to dancehall, where singles remain central to the genre’s commercial and cultural life, but the Grammy structure does not provide a dedicated dancehall recording award.
Antaeus pointed to a project involving Spice that had been submitted for Global Music Performance because, as he put it, “reggae doesn’t have a single.”
The distinction can affect both how a project is classified and the audience of voters it needs to reach.
Spice is preparing a reggae surprise
Beyond the Grammy politics, the producer said he was working to complete a new album by Spice, the Jamaican dancehall star whose career has been defined by her commanding performances, provocative lyricism and enduring place in the genre.
“We’re trying to finish Spice’s album, because that will be the hottest reggae album for next year, I can tell you that.”
When pressed on whether he was confirming a new reggae album from Spice, Antaeus revealed that the project would straddle two musical identities.
“Spice dropping an album that’s half reggae and half dancehall.”
He paused and acknowledged the significance of the disclosure.
“That’s an exclusive. I just gave it to you.”
For an artist widely recognised as the Queen of Dancehall, a project placing reggae alongside dancehall in equal measure would represent an intriguing development.
It could also introduce different dimensions of Spice’s voice and artistry to audiences more accustomed to her high-energy dancehall recordings.
“The dancehall queen is also singing reggae,” Antaeus said.
“A lot of people are going to be surprised.”
The producer did not provide a confirmed release date, final title or track listing during the conversation.
