Not to derail the thread but also with the discussion of "craft" as a metric to define AOTY this could go into a wider discussion about music theory and white supremacy but there's a video on that

Why does craft boil down to music that should be thought about?

Isn't there merit in making people move?

Jazz and Rock were invented by breaking the rules of music

But at the end of the day, I think complaining that a populist award show hasn’t catered to the zeitgeist is ultimately futile because… what exactly are we talking about?

25 sold more copies in its first week than Lemonade did in its first year, and has lapped it multiple times over since. Hello is, by some distance, more of a widely known song than anything on Lemonade. I think Lemonade is a far better album but using your own criteria, the right album won.

Taylor Swift has been no less than the third most popular artist in every year for well over a decade now, and spent much of that time as the undisputed #1… she also has the record for most Album of the Year Grammy’s.

Billie Eilish had the most popular album of 2019, it won Album of the Year.

There are of course valid examples you list, but Beck winning over Beyoncé is not at all the same thing as Taylor winning over Beyoncé.

The reason I specifically narrowed the 'data points' down to the 2000s and 2010s (I was in college at the time) is that I'm talking about monoculture—the moments when I knew exactly where I was and where the wider culture was when these albums dropped.

For example, Lemonade held a longer discourse in the "culture", on radio, blogs, social media and in my own personal life (friends, bars, clubs etc.) than 25.

And for an award show that broadcasts itself on a major network shouldn't AOTY reflect the audience watching or just the people in the room? If so then the Grammys shouldn't be televised.

But who says they don’t (for the most part) already do that?

Lemonade was a huge moment for me too. But it was never not going to be. I surrounded myself with, went to places, and watched/listened to things that reinforced that.

But the fact still remains that 25 sold exponentially better than Lemonade did. And people weren’t just using those CD’s as coasters. If you were the right demographic for that album, you probably had a similar experience than you and I did with Lemonade.

The musical zeitgeist is, in reality, an insular group of similar age and taste, but it doesn’t often reflect the majority.

It stands in contrast with film, where the zeitgeist for almost two decades now has been driven by tentpole franchises, reboots and remakes that the majority eat up, and while film culture has largely and reluctantly accepted that, the zeitgeist hasn’t been rewarded.

Again, I think you make a few good examples. Robert Plant, Beck, Arcade Fire, Jon Batiste, etc. but these are few and far between exceptions. More often than not, they default to the most popular artist and/or album.

Ironically, the album for which they finally rewarded Beyoncé was by far the least impactful of her last four.

I think the better argument is that the Grammy’s just rarely reward the outright best album, and that sometimes that album is also the biggest album.