TRACI JONES, HARTSELLE, ALABAMA: Hi, I'm Traci Jones from Hartselle, Alabama. My question is, what is the process for Grammy nominations?</s>MIKE GREENE, PRESIDENT AND CEO, RECORDING ACADEMY: The very first entering process has to do with filling out an application, putting the name of the recording, the artist, and sending it in to the national office. We typically will have somewhere around 15,000 entries come into the process. And the process is very methodical. We get the entries in. We then take all the entries. And they may have entered them in the wrong category. You know, sometimes you'll think something -- a Mariah Carey tune is a pop tune. Well, maybe it's not. Maybe it's an R&B; tune. So we have to go through, recategorize everything. We make sure they're eligible. We then send all of that out to the 13,000 voting members, and they vote on what they believe are the five best recordings. We send all those in to Deloitte and Touche, our accounting firm, and they then come up with the final five. Then the whole membership votes on the final five.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And the nominees are: Andreas Carlson and Max Martin, songwriters...</s>GREENE: And then on Grammy night, we open up that envelope and there's the winner.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And the Grammy goes to Itaal Shur and Rob Thomas.
Ask CNN: What Is The Process for Grammy Nominations?