Here’s what the 2024 Grammys stage will look like

The year of the Barbie may have come and gone, but the 2024 Grammy Awards are still very much embracing pink. 

New photos of this year’s Grammys set reveal an almost jarringly pink seating area for nominees. On stage, a gold backdrop flanks a 20-foot-tall mirrored gramophone statue, an addition that debuted at last year’s awards. The statue’s circular horn points out toward the audience and serves as an entrance for hosts. Symbolically, it’s also meant to represent the iconic gramophone statuette and act as “a grand gesture to the creation of sound and music.” 

This year is New York-based design firm Yellow Studio’s third time conceptualizing the Grammys stage. In 2022, the firm’s inspiration was drawn from “finely crafted musical instruments.” Last year, when the show moved from Las Vegas to Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena, the designers leaned into the age of AI with backgrounds by artist Refik Anadol, which he created using a dataset of more than 300 million images of nature. For 2024, Yellow Studio commissioned Australian artist David McLeod to create digital artwork that would play off of the central gramophone statue. 

According to the studio, McLeod’s rippling metallic design represents “the idea of how sound waves propagate through the air, while the circular patterns they create and the metallic texture of the surface anchor the visual to the environment.” Julio Himide, founder of Yellow Studio, wrote in an email to Fast Company that one of the main goals of designing for television—and, specifically, for the Grammys—is to blur the lines between tech and physical set pieces. 

“Our aim is to seamlessly blend video technology with real scenery,” Himide wrote. “This is most successful when the viewer at home struggles to distinguish between what is real and what is digital.”

The Grammys are set to air this Sunday on CBS with comedian Trevor Noah serving as host. Icons like Taylor Swift, SZA, and Billie Eilish (whose Barbie track “What Was I Made For?” is up for Song of the Year) are among those in the running.