There are 94 distinct categories at the 2025 Grammy Awards. Each year, the Recording Academy adds, subtracts, changes, and rearranges them into a bewildering assortment of genres. They are usually at least a decade behind the times, and often, their choices defy reason. And still, we watch. At least I do.
I watch for two main reasons. First, as flawed as they are, the Grammys remain an important historical marker. Like all mainstream award exercises, they offer very little insight into what actually constitutes the "best” of anything. But they are a fabulous indication of what we thought was culturally significant at the time. So they are a great tool for historians to look at and place in context.
If that’s too long-range for you. There’s always the second reason I watch. The Grammys are the best major arts award show there is. By a mile. The program will feature more than a dozen performances of popular songs from a wide swath of the current musical landscape.
Who will win in the Pop categories at the 2025 Grammy Awards
Live songs are much better suited to a television program than are film clips from movies or TV, or numbers from Broadway musicals lifted from their shows. The greatest moments in Award show history come almost entirely from the Grammys.
To put it more bluntly. I may not remember much from 2024, but I do fondly recall Dua Lipa’s opening medley from last year, and will never forget the Tracy Chapman/Luke Combs duet that followed it.
I won’t try to predict all of this year’s Grammys. I hate to admit it, but I just don’t feel like I have a good enough handle on Contemporary Christian music, Album Notes, or New Age/Ambient/Chant tunes to offer an educated guess. If the Grammys ever get around to awarding a statuette for Best Broad-Range FanSite Music Writing, then I'm predicting my AudioPhix colleague StevieMac will win it, but until such a day, I’ll stick to the stuff I know a little better.
That still adds up to about 30 categories from a lot of mainstream genres, and since that’s way too many for one little article, I’ll carve it up into several. Today, we’ll begin with four mainstream pop categories.
The Grammys currently recognize seven categories under the broad field of Pop & Dance/Electronic Music. I’m going to predict four of them. You can do what you want with the other three.
Pop Solo Performance
This is stacked. Each one is a heavy hitter. Every nominee is also nominated for Record of the Year, though in true contrarian fashion, only three of the nominees are tabbed for the same song in both categories. As such, I am going to rule out both Beyonce (“Bodyguard”) and Charli XCX (“Apple”) since those were not the songs nominated for Record of the Year by their respective artists.
That leaves us with Chappell Roan (“Good Luck, Babe”), Billie Eilish (“Birds of a Feather”), and Sabrina Carpenter (“Espresso”) battling it out. If I’m playing percentages, I would go with the proven Grammy darling Eilish. But I think this is the category where they choose to honor Sabrina Carpenter and “Espresso.” I don’t think she will win any of the Big Four, so this seems like a pretty fair consolation prize.
Pop Duo/Group Performance
This has even more heavy artillery than the Solo category because four of the five nominees feature big-time duos. Taylor Swift and 2024 Best New Artist nominee Gracie Abrams, Beyonce and the ubiquitous Post Malone, the megawatt star power of Charli and Billie, and the Lady Gaga/Bruno Mars pairing that practically seems old school by now.
In a year where the Beatles are nominated for a major award, “old school” is a relative term, but Ariana Grande reached back 26 years for her nominated song, a reworking of Brandy and Monica’s Number One blockbuster from 1998 “The Boy is Mine.”
I do think Charli and Billie have an outside chance here, but my tea leaves say this is a Gaga/Mars romp for “Die With a Smile.”
Pop Vocal Album
Grande’s is the only album not also nominated for Album of the Year so I’m leaving that one out. You could go broke betting against Taylor Swift in any album category, but I think this is the year where her death grip finally breaks. That leaves the two newcomers Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Road, along with that grand old lady of the Grammys – 23-year-old Billie Eilish – in contention.
Personally, I like Chappell Roan’s music more than I like the others, and that may be reflected in later picks. But in the Pop category, I think this is a Carpenter/Eilish showdown. The real question for me is whether the Academy will split Solo Performance and Album or whether the same artist will sweep. Nothing more than a hunch – I’m saying Billie’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT wins the Pop Album prize.
Dance/Electronic Album
I’m skipping other Dance/Electronic categories for singles because, well, I really have no clue. But I’m going out on a limb here. It’s not much of a limb really, because I think this is the most guaranteed winner of the four I am choosing today.
Usually, choosing an artist who has never won a Grammy over multiple artists who have won is a bad idea. Zedd has won a Grammy and Justice has won two, including in this very category in 2019. Charli XCX has never won a Grammy. She had two nominations coming into this year, and then racked up eight more in 2025 from Brat and its expanded edition. So I feel pretty confident saying that Charli and Brat take the prize this year.
Next time, a different field. That's what the Grammys calls different genres. Yeah, I don't really get it.