The general field Grammys categories, colloquially known as the Big Four, are the most prestigious awards handed out by the Recording Academy: Album Of The Year, Record Of The Year, Song Of The Year, and Best New Artist. For the first six decades of the Grammys, there were five nominees in each category, but in recent years that number has inflated. First, in 2018, the categories ballooned to eight nominees apiece, then, ahead of the 2022 ceremony, they bumped the number up to 10 at the last minute before announcing the nominees. Now it’s going back down to eight.

As the New York Times reports, some members of the academy complained that expanding the nominee pool lowered the threshold for winners, theoretically allowing an artist to win with just over 10% of the vote. Grammys president Harvey Mason Jr. denied to the NYT that he’d encountered any such complaints, but he said members considered similar questions when voting last month to shrink the nominees lists back down: “Does the vote get split? Is 10 too many? Does it minimize the nomination? All these conversations were happening in trying to find what is the best number.”

The Grammys are also raising the threshold for inclusion of names as part of an album’s nomination. The Academy used to require a person to perform on at least 33% of an album’s songs to have their name listed with a nomination, but that percentage was reduced to zero in 2022, leading to nominations with more than 100 names attached. The threshold has been raised back up to 20%. The eligibility period for next year’s awards is an unconventional 11 1/2 months, from Oct. 1, 2022, to Sept. 15, 2023. The Grammys recently added three new categories for 2024.