Two Former Recording Academy Execs Help Steer Grammy Campaigns: ‘We’re Just Fortunate to Now Be on the Other Side of It’

Lisa Goich-Andreadis and Jeriel Johnson spent a combined 20 years at the Recording Academy. Now, they’re using their knowledge of Grammy rules and their connections in the music community to try to boost clients’ chances of receiving nominations and awards. They started doing this work together in July 2024 and officially launched the Awards Agency LLC in March of this year.

They report that they had 32 clients leading up to the 68th Grammy Awards on Feb. 1, and that those clients received a combined 27 Grammy nominations and six wins.

Both partners say that the transition from working for the Academy to working for their own awards consulting firm has required them to adjust their thinking. At the Academy, a core value is being scrupulously non-partisan. Now, by definition, they are taking sides.

“The first year I was very uncomfortable doing it,” Goich-Andreadis acknowledges, “because I was [at the Academy] 13 years, 14 [awards] seasons, but now I’m used to it, because we have a rhythm, our business plan is very solid and we really found our space.”

Goich-Andreadis oversaw the jazz and comedy genres when she was at the Academy, as well as the Special Merit Awards and the Grammy Hall of Fame. Johnson oversaw the hip-hop, R&B and reggae genres, was executive director for the Academy’s Washington D.C. chapter and was a co-founder of the Black Music Collective.

Both are based in Los Angeles. Johnson moved back to L.A. from Washington D.C. in 2022.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

There have been Oscar consultants for decades, but it’s relatively new to have consultants on Grammy campaigns, isn’t it?

Goich-Andreadis: The film industry has been doing this for a long time. The movie studios really go all-in on some of their films. For music it’s not quite the same, but it’s becoming a thing.

Johnson: It’s almost been an if-you-know-you-know thing in music. Companies do identify their priorities usually by early spring that they’re going to want to focus on. They’ll decide, “We’re going to put a campaign behind this artist,” and so we get to work with amazing teams at the labels, amazing management companies, who have great things going on for their artists, and then we just kind of plug in to what they already have going on.

When did you first have the idea to do this?

Johnson: After seven years at the Recording Academy, I left and went to a label, but while I was there, people just continued to call and say, “Hey, how does this work?” or “What is the deadline for this?” or “Who should I call?” and I would find myself on the phone for an hour sometimes just giving away all this institutional and experiential knowledge from understanding the ecosystem of the organization.

At some point a friend says to me, “Hey, we had a marketing meeting at our company, and they mentioned they were going to hire some consultants to work on our Grammy campaigns for our artists, and it just dawned on me that you used to work at the Grammys. I don’t know if that’s something that you’d consider doing, but I’d love to talk to you about it.” I was like, “What do they normally do for these things?” And when he told me, I was like, “Oh, that’s it? Well, they didn’t think about this or that?” And he was like, “Well, I’ll definitely hire you if you want to do it.” So that’s when it was like, “Oh, OK, it’s a thing.”

Fast forward that summer, I ran into a guy at a party, and I said “I’m going to start telling people I’m a Grammy consultant,” and so I told this guy, he’s pretty high up at a label, and he was like, “Dude, you have to understand, every year we are trying to figure out how to campaign, and in the urban music space, in particular, I don’t know that there’s any consultants that are guiding the culture in the community through the Grammy Awards process who actually worked there and know how it works.” And so he was like, “Let’s talk.”

I ended up calling Lisa and letting her know. We were close colleagues at the Grammys, we were two doors down from each other in the office, lived near each other, so we would carpool to work, we were friends, I called her to let her know I was doing Grammy consulting, she ended up calling me a few months later saying, “Hey, I have a manager who’s looking for a Grammy consultant. I don’t know if that’s something that you’re doing still, but I’d love to connect you.” She connected the dots, and at the same time, she said, “I’m also going to be leaving the Grammys, and if I do, I’d love to maybe come together, and we can maybe do this together.” So that’s kind of how it was born.

Is it a little strange for you to be on the other side of it when you were at the Academy for so long?

Goich-Andreadis: I can answer that right off the bat, because the first year I was very uncomfortable doing it, because I was there 13 years, 14 seasons, but now I’m used to it, because we have a rhythm, our business plan is very solid, and we really found our space.

Johnson: We have the utmost respect for the Grammys and the Recording Academy. When you work there, you really take it seriously in terms of protecting the integrity of the awards process. We talk about that all the time, so that’s our approach. It’s like, “OK, Client A says they want to do X, Y, Z,” We’re like, “Yeah, that sounds great. However, these are the guidelines, these are the rules, these are the things you should stay away from, these are the things that we’ve seen cause a flag, these are the things that we’ve seen be successful.”

I did have a moment when I left where I wanted to try to disassociate because I had become “Jeriel from the Grammys,” and while I appreciated the connectivity to such a prestigious and amazing organization, when you’re in a role like that, it’s very easy to become that, and so as I took my next step, I was looking for other things, and this just kept chasing me, man. People just kept calling, like, “Hey, man, can you, can you, can you?”

I imagine you checked in with the Academy to explain what you’re doing.

Johnson: I had a call with [Recording Academy CEO] Harvey [Mason jr.] and said, “Hey, this is this is what I’m doing,” and he was pretty cool about it: “OK, sounds good.” We do communicate with [Recording Academy] staff from time to time, because they’re our friends. These are people we worked with for a long time, and we’re a part of the community. We’re also [non-voting] Recording Academy [professional] members, and as members who happen to be former employees, we’re constantly cognizant of making sure that we are doing everything in accordance with Academy guidelines.

Goich-Andreadis: I was going to go be a consultant, but when I started, it wasn’t the Awards Agency, I had my own little company, and I was going to be helping musicians. My husband’s a musician, and I see the needs that music industry people have, in general, and especially with the Grammy Awards. It’s funny how many people don’t even realize they can become Recording Academy members. So, I think what Jeriel and I do, we hook people up with the membership teams; we make sure that they know what an important thing it is to become a Recording Academy member, because it helps not only for people who want to vote, but also all of the activities that take place there, the chapter events and everything are a great way for the music community to come together.

I think our knowledge and knowing the schedules and knowing the people involved, we reach out to the folks on the team all the time, like if we have questions about FYC or anything, we’ve reached out to the legal team. I also think it helps the people that are still in the awards department, to take some of that off of their shoulders because people call constantly when you’re in the awards department. “What is this?” “Can I do this?” “Can I do that?” We just help labels, we help guide people through all the rules, especially labels that don’t have somebody on staff who works specifically for awards.

How do you see your role?

Johnson: We are amplifying projects. We amplify music. If you’re a member of the Academy and you are submitting music for Grammy consideration, the question becomes, How do you bring visibility to that project? How do you create a space to bring awareness and visibility to these projects that people have poured their lives into? The clients that we are fortunate to work with, they look to us to be sort of on-the-ground connectors around this music to music creators, music professionals, many of whom happen to be members of the Recording Academy.

Because we’ve worked at the Academy, we have great relationships in the business. We’re just fortunate to now be on the other side of it and still have friendships and relationships where folks look to us for knowledge, and I think we have found a way to support the community in this way. It’s also gratifying, because it’s a service that we provide that we know is helpful. It helps to demystify a very complicated and confusing process. Between the deadlines, the requirements, how to even get involved, there’s a lot of questions. We’re a marketing company that’s trying to help folks get Grammy nominations and wins.

Goich-Andreadis: I would like to add one thing here: We do not share anything proprietary. Anything that we help people with is already there. They turn out the Grammy [Rules & Guidelines handbook] every year. They turn out the Grammy FYC book every year. But I can tell you, my husband, the musician, he can barely get through a ballot on his own without help. For him to read through those rules, and for him to read through the FYC stuff [is challenging].

Here’s the deal: I’m a nerd, I knew the rules back and forth at that company, I absorb them, I know them, they’re second-nature for us, and they’re things that regular people don’t know, so it’s nothing that’s proprietary, it’s stuff that’s out there, but for a lot of people it’s daunting, they don’t even want to go there, so they’ll hold up something and say, “Is this ad OK?” and we have to say, “Oh no, you can’t put the Grammy logo in there” or “You can’t say that you have 100,000 streams on Spotify, you need to take that out.” So it’s mostly stuff like that that people are just not aware of.

So, a lot of what you do is in reading and interpreting that handbook.

Johnson: Once you’ve absorbed and digested the rules themselves, then you have the bureaucracy of the organization and the layers of the organization and understanding how to navigate and how to move and how to be a part of it. For the purposes of what we do, that rule book is The Bible, and everything kind of flows from there. We read it a couple times a year, and we have to reference it when people bring up an idea that they want to do, and we’re like, “OK, yes,” or “No” or “Let’s reach out to legal real quick, and let us get back to you, because we think it’s a great idea, we just don’t want to get dinged.”

Goich-Andreadis: We often reach out to legal. Like it’ll be something as simple as somebody will say, “I’m putting out an EP,” and what we know right away is to say, “How many songs are on your EP? How many minutes is the EP?” Nobody knows those rules that are surrounding those things like we would know, so we do a lot of help like that.

I left in July of 2024. I was going to be consulting in some capacity, but like Jeriel, I had people calling me constantly, and my jazz people – they’ve worked with me a long time, and they depend on you. They’re people who call you constantly. They still call me. They’re not our clients, but they’ll call me, and they’ll say, “My membership expired,” and I’ll say, “Well, here’s the email address.” “Well, I wrote to the email, and nobody answered me. Can you put me through to somebody?” Sure.

So I’ll connect them on email. No, they’re not our clients, they’re just people I’m helping to get simple tasks done that we take for granted, but we literally know the people [to contact].

Do potential clients ever inquire if you have the list of voting members?

Johnson: We get that question a lot, where a client will call us and say, “So do you guys have the list?” and we’re like “Number one, no, but number two, if you’re found out to have the official Grammy list, and you are affiliated with a project that you know would benefit from someone who worked and had that Grammy list, you will be disqualified.” We don’t want to jeopardize our clients.

Goich-Andreadis: Yeah, and also we want to say this, because this is something we always stress to our clients, from day to day, you don’t know who’s a voter. Somebody’s membership could expire tomorrow, or the next day, or next week, or it’s already expired. We don’t know. And I think to put [clients] in front of just people in the music business is the important thing, because word-of-mouth travels. If you see an act at a club, and it’s the most mind-blowing thing you’ve ever seen, you’re going to tell five of your friends who are probably also in the music business, and then they’re going to post something on their socials.

So, it is a word-of-mouth thing that absolutely does not just encompass voters. In fact, we like to say we just reach out to music people, people who love music, and even fans, sometimes, because fans will help amplify an artist moreso than anybody in the Grammy sphere could.

Who usually hires you – the manager, the record company, the artist?

Johnson: It’s a mix. We have label clients, we have media companies, we also have independent artists, and then we have independent labels, and then we’ll get a call from a management company.

Goich-Andreadis: And sometimes a management company who wants to support their artists, but the label doesn’t have any money to support them, like if it’s a small label, and then the management company says our label isn’t doing anything for promotion. What is it that you can do to help us? So we really are a marketing firm, above all, and just based on a really concierge sort of atmosphere that we’ve cultivated here.

Do people hire you for the year, for the award season, for a month?

Johnson: All of the above. As far as year-round clients, we have a handful, a smaller amount of folks will do that, but it’s increasing. Last year working with one client in particular that started in January, and we worked that campaign from January 2025 up through the show, and it resulted in multiple nominations and wins.

We took a trip in January to New York, and we did a round of meetings with the labels to start talking about the upcoming awards year, and so again, in many of those conversations they were saying, “Hey, you know, give us a couple months, we’re going to kind of see how the year pans out, identify our priorities, get our budgets in order,” so I’d say we start to kind of heat up by May. And then they start making Grammy announcements in June.

Everybody wakes up about the Grammys, so we’re pretty busy right now, but our busiest time is July, August, September. And then, October, you’re at the finish line with the voting window Oct. 12-22, so that front end of October is feverish. We’re getting people calling while voting is going on, saying, “I know there’s three days voting left. Is there anything you guys can do?” And we’re like, “No, it’s so late.” We encourage folks to start as early as possible.

Goich-Andreadis: What we try to do is amplify the projects, not necessarily for Grammys, but just to amplify them in general, because the amplification in general is going to help for the Grammys. So, if we start amplifying something in February, it’s not necessarily Grammy-related. Some people don’t even have their albums finished by then, right? It might just be a single or something. So, we’re working with the teams to say, “Here’s what you need to do.” We’ll consult on things like feature acts or producers and engineers.

How do you decide who to take on as a client?

Johnson: We want to build a company that has a reputation for excellence. Our slogan is “We Amplify Excellence.” I think intentionally we try to pick and work with clients that we believe are contenders. We’re competitive, we want to be the best Grammy consulting agency. We believe we’re the best at what we do, because of our unique sort of positions, and so, in order to maintain that, we want to associate with projects that, you know, procure nominations and wins.

Goich-Andreadis: And also things that excite us. We always tell clients the first minute we’re on a phone call with them, we cannot promise a nomination or a win. We all know that. We make that clear. It’s in our contract, it’s in everything we say. That said, sometimes, and we have a couple projects this year, we don’t know where they’re going to go, but we know that when we’re looking at these projects, these are amazing projects. So when we see excellence in something, it’s not like, “Oh, this is a person who’s won 12 Grammys already, so we know that they’re going to win one,” we’re looking at it like, “This project is so amazing, we want the world to know about it. We want to be involved with it, and gosh darn it, we hope it gets a nomination.”

Is there anything you want to add?

Johnson: We have been blessed to be able to fall into this as a career where we were fledgling at first, like, “Do we?,” “How do we?,” “What do we?” “Should we?” And now people trust us, and they see us as an authority in this space, and we are honored by that.

Goich-Andreadis: Yeah, and I can also add that we’re passionate about what we do, and it’s fun for us right now to be in this position to have a job where we can help to amplify the music that we love. You can’t really do that when you’re with the Academy. You can’t promote things when you’re there because that wouldn’t be right. But it’s nice to be passionate, and I can tell you, when we watched the show this year, it was Jeriel and me and another person that used to work at the Academy, just three of us watching the Grammys with a spreadsheet out of our clients and their nominations, and checking the boxes off as people would win or not win. It was pure passion that went into that moment.