BMSG founder and CEO SKY-HI and all six members of BE:FIRST — SOTA, SHUNTO, MANATO, RYUHEI, JUNON, and LEO — have joined the Recording Academy, gaining voting rights for the 69th Grammy Awards, taking place on February 7th 2027. They are among over 4000 music professionals invited to join on July 9th.

The news comes one month after the Academy announced Best Asian Pop Music Performance, a new category making its debut at the same ceremony. BMSG said the selection reflected recognition of the seven artists’ creative work and achievements to date.

“For some time, I have been working on production and creative endeavours with the goal of realising a future in which Japanese music succeeds globally”, SKY-HI said in a statement. “Against this backdrop, I am deeply honoured to have been selected as a member of the Recording Academy”. He added that the challenge remains incomplete, and that as a member of the global music community he intends to keep working to support the growth of Japan’s music scene, and to have even a small positive impact on music culture worldwide.

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BMSG declared a “second founding phase” just over two weeks earlier, at its Greeting & Gathering ’26 business conference on June 29th. The company set out plans to increase investment in creative work built to global standards, expand overseas, and hold the first international edition of BMSG FES by its tenth anniversary in 2030, describing the goal as a determination to “create a place for J-POP on the global shelf”.

SKY-HI has spent two decades working as a rapper, producer and songwriter, the kind of career the Academy’s voting membership is designed to represent, although it does not disclose how individual candidates meet its requirements. He founded BMSG in September 2020 under the company’s mission “to prevent talent from being stifled”. Its roster includes BE:FIRST, MAZZEL, HANA, and STARGLOW.

BE:FIRST‘s first dome tour ran to nine shows across four cities from December 2024, drawing around 300,000 people, and BE:FIRST World Tour 2025 -Who is BE:FIRST?- took them to 12 cities across the US, Asia, and Europe. In May 2026 they played their first solo stadium show, BE:FIRST Stadium Live 2026 We are the “BE:ST”. In June they appeared on a remix of Janet Jackson’s ‘Doesn’t Really Matter’, released ahead of their appearance at her K Arena Yokohama show.

BE:FIRST with Janet Jackson backstage at K Arena Yokohama, where they performed ‘Doesn’t Really Matter (Remix)’ together on June 14th.

South Korean entertainment company JYP Entertainment also confirmed on July 14th that Park Jin-young and every member of TWICE and Stray Kids — 18 artists in total — had joined as voting members. CEO Jung Wook and Chief Strategy Officer Shin Hyun-kook joined under a separate tier for industry professionals, who can put music forward for consideration but cannot vote on the awards themselves.

Voting members include working artists, songwriters, producers and engineers. They vote in both the nomination and final rounds of the Grammy Awards. The Recording Academy does not accept open applications for membership. Candidates must be recommended by two people working full-time in music, after which their careers and credits are reviewed by industry peers. Successful candidates receive an invitation, which must be formally accepted before their membership begins.