A Grammy® Submission Guide

Did you know you don't have to be a member of the Recording Academy to have your work submitted for Grammy® consideration? Most artists don't. What you do need is a Recording Academy member — either a Voting Member or a Professional Member — willing to submit through the official Online Entry Portal (OEP) on your behalf.

Voting Members are the artists, producers, songwriters, and engineers who actually vote on the awards. Professional Members are music industry professionals — executives, educators, and others — who hold membership but don't vote. Both can submit. Finding the right person, and preparing properly before you ever open the portal together, is what this checklist is for.

A note on language: "Consideration" is the Recording Academy's official term for this stage of the process — not a nomination, and not interchangeable with one. Nominations come later, in November, when each category narrows to five finalists. Some broader categories, like Best New Artist, narrow to ten. Consideration is the stage before that reckoning. It has its own weight.

What it requires is preparation, patience, and at least one person with a Recording Academy membership who believes in your work. The portal changes year to year. What this checklist prepares you for is everything you bring to it — not everything it will ask.

Confirm Eligibility

• Verify your release date falls within the current eligibility year. The eligibility window generally runs September through August of the following year.
• Confirm commercial distribution on major streaming or download platforms — Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube are among the accepted platforms, but verify the current list on the Recording Academy's website before assuming yours qualifies. Direct-to-consumer platforms may not meet the requirement. Check carefully. The accepted platform list is worth confirming each cycle.

Prepare Your Recording Assets

• Track title(s) — spelled and formatted exactly as they appear on your release.
• Artist name(s) — as credited on the release.
• Release date
• Label name
• Genre / category — research this carefully before the portal opens. Category selection shapes everything.
• ISRC code for each track
• UPC code for the release
• Run times for each track
• Cover art — have it ready at distributor-standard resolution (3000×3000 pixels is the industry norm). The Recording Academy does not publish specific pixel or file size requirements for the standard OEP cover art upload. What the portal asks for, it tells you in the moment. Going in with distributor-ready art means you won't be caught short by whatever it asks.

Confirm Sponsor or Membership

• Identify a Recording Academy member who will submit on your behalf — either a Voting Member or a Professional Member — or confirm your own membership. Both Voting and Professional Members can submit through the OEP. Begin this conversation early — members are people with their own calendars and obligations.
• Provide your sponsor with: your full legal name, email address, complete release information, and full credits including artwork.

Another Route: Registered Media Companies

• If you don't have a personal connection to a voting member, look into whether any organizations you already belong to are registered as Recording Academy Media Companies — music schools, songwriter associations, genre guilds, and artist organizations can all qualify. This ecosystem is growing, and it's growing quietly. Ask directly.
• Start asking now — not in July. Neither of my sponsors were people I knew well — both were friend-of-a-friend connections, and one had only heard me sing online. We submitted together via Zoom. Online relationships count.

The landscape of who can submit on your behalf is changing year to year. What wasn't available to independent artists last cycle may be available now. Check annually, and check with your regional music community first — Nashville, Atlanta, and other active markets often have more infrastructure than artists realize.

Prepare Streaming Links

• Gather direct streaming links from major platforms — Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, or YouTube. Personal audio files (WAV, AIFF, MP3) cannot be submitted. The portal requires commercially released links.
• Use the official share or permalink from each platform — not the address copied from your browser bar. The URL in your browser bar often contains a long chain of tracking code after an "=" sign — that extra string is not part of the link itself, and it can break the destination entirely when someone else tries to open it. Always use the Share button on the platform and copy the link it generates. That is the clean link. That is the one that opens.
• Test every link before submitting — open it in a private or incognito browser window while logged out of all music accounts. That's the closest you can get to what a stranger sees. Checking on a second device is good additional practice.
• Make sure your links are not formatted as hyperlinks in your Word document. In Word, right-click any underlined link and choose "Remove Hyperlink." What you want is for the full web address to sit on the page like a phone number — visible, plain, easy to select and paste.

ISNI Identifiers — Get Them Now. For Everyone.

• Get your own ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) first. An ISNI is a permanent unique number assigned to you across entertainment industries worldwide — it exists so that royalties, credits, and awards reach the right person, not someone else who shares your name. Right now. Before anything else on this list. The free path for music artists runs through Sound Credit — their platform has the ISNI application built in at no cost. Go to soundcredit.com and register. Do not wait.
• Contact every credited collaborator on your recording and get their ISNI number directly from them — now, before the portal opens. The portal will tell you whose ISNI it needs while your sponsor is sitting there waiting and the clock is running. That is not the moment to start making phone calls.
• If any collaborator doesn't have an ISNI yet, start the process immediately — and if they have a common name, it is even more urgent. There can be dozens of people registered under the same name in the global database. An ISNI is what separates the right person from every other person with that name.
• Collect full contact information for every credited collaborator — legal name, email address, and ISNI — including the artist who created your cover artwork. Contact information for collaborators may be required in the portal itself. Do not assume you have this on hand. Check your files now.

Build a Submission Document

• Create a single Word document containing every piece of submission information — ready to copy and paste field by field.
• Email the completed document to your sponsor before the session — and plan to be present with them for the entire submission. In my case, that meant a Zoom call where my sponsor cast his screen so I could see the portal exactly as he was filling it out. We were in different states. That visibility made all the difference.
• Include: track titles, artist names, release date, genre/category, ISRC codes, UPC code, streaming links (not hyperlinked — see Section 4), full collaborator credits, and artwork credits.
• If submitting to more than one category, prepare a separate section in your document for each. Each category has its own asks. Assume nothing carries over automatically.
• The portal will ask about AI use in the recording — this question was recently added and reflects how the form evolves year to year.
• Write an artist statement before the portal opens — the submission marked it optional, but it's worth having. What I didn't expect was that writing it sharpened everything else — the statement and my liner notes kept clarifying each other with each pass.

Submit Through the Portal

• Log in at onlineentry.grammy.com — this link is only active during the submission window, which typically opens in July. If you visit before then, you may see an error page — that's expected. Bookmark it now and return when the portal opens.
• Complete each entry fully — project information, category selection, collaborator credits, and streaming link. Treat each category as its own separate submission, because the portal does.
• Submit before the deadline — the portal typically closes at 6 PM PT / 8 PM CT / 9 PM ET on the final day. The portal opens in July; submissions close in August.

If You Need Help

• Contact Recording Academy Member Services by phone or email during the submission window. Phone: (866) 794-3391 · Monday–Friday, 9 AM – 5 PM PT. Email: memberservices [at] recordingacademy.com. Email can be faster than phone. Both channels get slower as the deadline approaches. If you have a question, ask it early.