GRAMMY Awards brings back the Best Album Cover category

According to a recent announcement, the 2026 GRAMMY Awards will bring back the Best Album Cover category

The Recording Academy has announced that the GRAMMY Awards will bring back an old category. This will involve a bit of a restructuring of the categories, but it will certainly be a big help to the art world.

The Recording Academy has made a number of changes for the 2026 GRAMMY Awards, including a shake-up of the categories. On Thursday, the Recording Academy announced that it will merge the Best Recording Package and Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package categories. This was also necessary to make it more meaningful and of course to separate the new category, which is: Best Album Cover. This means that the previous “physical” categories in terms of “presentation” will now be placed under the name Best Recording Package, while leaving room for plain cover art in the new category. One important piece of information is that the Recording Academy, as the name suggests, will accept the Best Album Cover category only for albums, not for singles and EPs. There has also been many great news in electronic music in recent years and even months in terms of GRAMMY nominations.

Interestingly, the Grammys originally called the Best Recording Package category “Best Album Cover” when they started in 1959. The winner that year was Frank Sinatra with his album “Sings for Only the Lonely”. However, the music industry is changing by its very nature, and nowadays it’s almost every month that we have to update our knowledge to keep up to date. Back then, the Grammys awarded albums as physical objects, but today they must take digitalization into account. And it was a very good idea to give cover art a chance to do that, within the new category, which will definitely do a lot to lift the visuals. The 2026 GRAMMYs will be held on February 1 and nominations will be announced on November 7, 2025.