The 2022 Grammy Awards will be held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on April 3, the Recording Academy confirmed on Tuesday (Jan. 18).
This will be the first time the telecast has been held anywhere but L.A. or New York since 1973, when it was held in Nashville. And it will be the first time the show has ever been held in a city in which the Recording Academy doesn’t have chapter.
This will be the latest in the calendar year that the Grammys have been held since the seventh annual Grammy Awards were held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. on April 13, 1965. (That was before the first live Grammy telecast in 1971.)
This year’s delay of the Grammy telecast, due to the fast-spreading omicron variant, is about three weeks longer than last year’s delay, also due to post-holidays COVID-19 spread in Los Angeles. The 2021 Grammy Awards were pushed back from Jan. 31 to March 14. The 2022 Grammys were also pushed back from an initial Jan. 31 airdate.
Trevor Noah, host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, will host the rescheduled Grammy show, as he did last year. The show will be produced by Fulwell 73 Productions for the Recording Academy. Raj Kapoor serves as showrunner and executive producer alongside Ben Winston and Jesse Collins as executive producers, and Jeannae Rouzan-Clay as co-executive producer. Hamish Hamilton returns as director, and Eric Cook as supervising producer with Tabitha D’umo, Patrick Menton, Fatima Robinson, and David Wild as producers.
The first CMT Awards broadcast on CBS, previously scheduled for April 3, will be moved to a later date in April — the exact date is still to be determined. The CMT Awards, normally broadcast on CMT, moved from their usual June time spot to April to fill in for CBS and the ACM Awards not renewing their partnership.
Last year’s Grammys were relocated from Staples Center (now Crypto.com Arena), their L.A. home since 2000, to the nearby Los Angeles Convention Center. This year will mark the first time the show has not been held at Staples/Crypto.com two years running since the venue opened.
Located on the Las Vegas Strip inside the MGM Grand hotel and casino, the MGM Grand Garden Arena has operated as a 50-50 joint venture between AEG and MGM Resorts International since 2016. AEG also owns Crypto.com Arena, which has hosted the Grammys 19 times in the last 22 years.
The MGM Grand Garden Arena has played host to several major award shows. It has hosted the Latin Grammy Awards six times from 2014-21. It also hosted the Academy of Country Music Awards 12 times from 2006-19; and the Billboard Music Awards 17 times from 1997-2019.
The 29-year-old sports and music venue has also hosted massive sports and music events like the 2015 Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao fight and Phish’s annual Halloween concert series.
In terms of hosting the 2022 Grammys, the MGM Grand Garden Arena met two essential requirements – it’s available in April and at 17,000 seats it has a large enough seating capacity to host the event. There is, however, one serious disadvantage — unlike Crypto.com Arena, it doesn’t have luxury suites.
That means a major financial concession for Recording Academy, which earns approximately $5 million each year leasing Crypto.com Arena’s 172 suites for “music’s biggest night,” sources tell Billboard. That additional revenue is likely even more important this year, following a scaled-down, no-audience ceremony at the LA Convention Center in March 2021.
Moving the Grammys to the spring left the Recording Academy with few good venue options. A springtime ceremony eliminates Crypto.com Arena and nearly every major professional sports arena in the country. Both the NHL and the NBA require every team in their respective leagues to hold all of April, May and most of June for playoff games and championships. There are exceptions for teams with no chance of making the postseason, but since opening in 1999, at least one of Crypto.com Arena’s three tenant teams has always made the playoffs. MGM Grand Garden Arena has no sports tenants.
Since the first live telecast in 1971, the Grammys have been held in Los Angeles 39 times, in New York 11 times and in Nashville once (in 1973).
Assuming the Academy Awards air as scheduled on March 27, this will be the first time that the Oscars will air before the Grammys since 1965. The Oscars were held on April 5 that year, eight days before the Grammys.
Dave Brooks and Melinda Newman assisted in this story.
