The 63rd Annual Grammy Awards took place on Sunday, March 14 and left most viewers underwhelmed and enraged. 

The nominees and winners are decided by the Recording Academy, a society made up of 21,000 members that are musicians, producers and other musical professionals. These members cast their votes for each category and the majority wins. 

After coming under fire for having a diversity problem a few years back, the Recording Academy promised to work toward diversifying their voting body and nominee selection. 

However, this promise has not been fulfilled. 

There is no better example of this then what happened to South Korean group, BTS, at this year’s ceremony. 

The band was nominated for their song “Dynamite” in the Best Pop Duo or Group Performance category, but they lost to Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande’s “Rain On Me” collaboration. 

Statistically speaking, “Dynamite” was far more popular than “Rain on Me.” 

On Spotify, “Dynamite” had more than 725 million streams leading up to the ceremony, while “Rain on me” had 541 million streams. On YouTube, BTS’s music video had approximately 920 million views, while Grande and Gaga’s track had around 300 million views. Not to mention how BTS sold three million copies of their song, while their opponent sold two million copies. 

Not only is the song more popular, but it is far better than Gaga and Grande’s tragedy of a track. 

“Rain On Me” is repetitive, boring and lacks lyricism or cohesiveness. 

On top of that, Grande and Gaga have several Grammys under their belt, as they’ve been in the industry for decades. However, this was BTS first nomination, and they deserved to be recognized for their explosive success. 

To make matters worse, their music was used for advertising since their fanbase is huge and they would bring in more viewers for the show. So, the Grammys used the band for publicity and made them walk away empty-handed. 

This left me and millions of others gravely disappointed in the Grammys. 

How is it fair that the current biggest boyband is taking the world by a storm, yet being ignored by the most coveted American award show?

The only logical reason I can think of is that the Academy doesn’t consider K-pop to be pop, which is inherently racist in itself. 

BTS and many other K-pop stars have had to work ten times harder to succeed in the music industry as they’ve had to cross language and cultural barriers to enter the American music industry. 

Failing to recognize their explosive success rubs me the wrong way. It goes to show that the Recording Academy’s push for diversity was an empty promise. 

If the award show knew that BTS wasn’t going to win the award, then they shouldn’t have used their music for promotion. Doing so only exploits the band for their massive fan base. 

The stars deserved the award more than their opposing nominees, and the Grammys deprived them of that recognition despite using them to reel in more viewers.