From the NYT a couple of weeks ago:

The cutoff date for eligibility for next year’s Grammy Awards will be shortened by a month because the 52nd annual awards ceremony will be held a bit earlier than usual, the Grammy organizers announced on Thursday. The 2010 ceremony will be on Jan. 31; this year the Grammys were presented on Feb. 8. The eligibility cutoff date for the 2010 awards will be Aug. 31.

One of the many crazy things about the Grammys is its curious eligibility window, generally from October to September.

This creates two problems: One, since so many important, by Grammy standards, CDs are released late in the year, it creates a disconnect between the CDs everyone’s talking about (not to mention the CDs that, say, critics pick in their end of year lists, based on the old-fashioned concept of the “calendar year”) and Grammy nominees.

Second, it allows Grammy-friendly artists and labels to game the system, by releasing advance singles just under the eligibility wire, allowing them to get to play the Grammy marketing game over two ceremonies. (Last year, remember, Alison Krauss and Robert Plant took album-of-the-year honors for a CD that contained a song the pair had won a Grammy for the previous year.)

This creates another of the Grammy oddities. The organization should force labels to pick their year for eligibility for a particular CD and the songs on it.

And so this year … the group moves the period back a month! (Because its show has been moved back a week.) Makes perfect sense.