Koffee’s Musical Evolution May Have Been Influenced By Her Grammy Win, New Study Suggests

The musical evolution of Koffee and other Grammy-winning artists may be influenced by the fact that they took home the Award, a new study suggests.

Until recently, the annually-held Grammys were thought to offer music fans little more than a night of glimmering entertainment. The new study blasts a hole in this notion; not only do Grammy outcomes weigh heavily on the stylistic and musical direction of winners and losers, but they also have the potential to shift the direction of entire genres — including Reggae and Dancehall.

The research, which will be published in the American Sociological Review next month, was conducted by US academics Giacomo Negro of Emory University, Balázs Kovács of Yale, and Glenn R Carroll of Stanford.  The findings show that artists typically gain boosts in sales and credibility from the triumph associated with a Grammy win. This all translates into greater leverage for that artist in future dealings with their profit-oriented music label and yields the promise of increased creative control and resources.

The authors suggest that when artists are freed from a label’s demands and are fuelled by post-Grammy confidence, they tend to change course on their follow-up album. Fresh sounds and styles don’t always bode well with audiences, however; the research indicates that many of these releases perform worse critically and commercially compared to their predecessors. “It’s an interesting conundrum, where the artist takes a different path but the audience doesn’t necessarily follow,” Negro  told the BBC.

Despite this, Grammy winners still command respect within their field and, by virtue of this fact, set the trends. A paradox then emerges: though the Grammy winner’s follow-up may be dismissed by listeners at first, its sounds are sometimes so widely imitated that they become the norm within that genre.

The team of researchers calculated the typical sound of a genre by comparing over 125,000 albums based on ten attributes which include “acousticness,” danceability, key, “speechiness,” and tempo. They then tracked Grammy nominees of the “big four” categories — best album, best new artist, song and record of the year — to see which artists strayed from the norm and which artists clung to it.

“Our research focuses on these four major and highly visible awards that have a significant impact on artists’ careers,” the study asserts. As the research explores the award show’s main draw, one might wonder what impact Grammy outcomes have on the nominees of less eye-catching categories like Best Reggae Album.

With a sixteen-minute runtime, Koffee’s debut Rapture managed to introduce the Spanish Town native to global audiences with a gust of styles. Flitting across Reggae and Dancehall traditions, Koffee often boasts her talent with razor-sharp wordplay and justifies her claims with rapid-fire flows and earworm hooks.

Rapture was such an impressive feat that when Koffee nabbed the Grammy for Best Reggae Album in 2020, nobody who had paid attention to her ascent should have been surprised. Her accolades piled up as she became both the youngest nominee to win the award and the first woman to do so. The praise surged and Reggae fans were left excited as they wondered what could be next for the young virtuoso.

While Rapture condensed Koffee’s talent into a five-song package, her 2022 follow-up Gifted allowed for more breathing room. She shifted gears accordingly. Rather than doubling down on the fiery Ragga toasts that colored her Grammy-winning project, she leaned into lower tempo rhythms and more melodic verses that house warm, more candid moments. Where I’m From is the closest bridge to her previous project but aside from that, the “used to fast, now me all a get speedier,” sentiment from Throne feels miles away.

The research revealed other Grammy-induced influences as well.

While winners often proceed to experiment in their subsequent releases, the losers tend to conform to the dominant sounds of the genre. The authors speculate that this might be explained by “silver medal syndrome,” a phenomenon in which first runners-up tend to compare themselves to the winner and begin to second-guess themselves.

The study arrives at an interesting time for the Grammys. As viewership dwindles and criticisms of representation grow, the research suggests that the awards ceremony has historically maintained significant sway over the fate of popular music. Given this imbalance of power and responsibility, fresh calls have been mounted to reconsider the Grammy’s place in the landscape of global music. If the music changes, shouldn’t its institutions do the same?