As much as we love the pre-show red carpet, the Grammy Awards photos that always tug at our heartstrings come after the winners have been announced, when the artists are posing with their Grammy trophies. Still, seeing celebrities like Phoebe Bridgers and Victoria Monét – who won four and three Grammys last night, respectively – balance multiple trophies in their arms does beg the question: how much do the Grammy trophies weigh, actually? Because carrying multiple awards looks like a serious arm workout.
As it turns out, it kind of is. According to the Los Angeles Times, each Grammys trophy – a 24-karat-gold-plated gramophone attached to a metal base – clocks in at about five pounds. So Bridgers was balancing a full 20 pounds of trophy on her arms. Depending on how long she was posing for photos, that’s definitely enough to leave her shoulders and biceps sore the next day.
Four Grammys is a huge number, but the most Grammy Awards an artist has won in a single night is twice that. Michael Jackson raked in eight awards in 1984; and in 2000, the band Santana matched that record. But Santana was left toting a heavier load than Jackson. In the early 1990s, the Grammy trophies’ maker was asked to scale the statues up so they looked bigger on TV screens and were less fragile, according to the LA Times. So the versions MJ carried in 1984 had a walnut base and were about 30 percent smaller than the ones Santana was balancing in 2000, which would have amounted to about 40 pounds.
That said, Jackson was carrying his wins all on his own, while Santana’s trophies were split among the band members in the post-Grammy pics. (In one, lead guitarist Carlos Santana posed behind the array of gramophones, which were spread out on the ground, per USA Today.) So if we’re looking for the artist who’s carried the most Grammy trophy weight in a single picture, the award might go to Beyoncé.
Despite the fact that she’s never won album of the year – which her husband, Jay-Z, criticized the Recording Academy for last night – the singer is the record holder for the most cumulative Grammy wins in history. Queen Bey has secured 32 Grammys over the years, including six awards in one year, 2010. (That said, she may have never actually posed for a pic while carrying all six.) If she were to hold all of her Grammys at once, she’d be lifting 160 pounds of trophies. She has so many gramophone trophies, we wouldn’t be totally surprised if she stashed a couple in her home gym in place of regular five-pound dumbbells.
In all the prep celebrities do for these award shows, strength training so you can hold all your Grammys for photos is something that doesn’t get talked about often. But maybe it should be, because even though the five-pound trophies are definitely sturdy, they’re not indestructible. Both Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo have dropped and broken a Grammy while posing with the gramophone statues, in separate years. (Swift was trying to balance four the year she committed the Grammys faux pas, and Rodrigo was juggling three.)
So in addition to respecting all the multi-award winners from last night and years prior for their musical prowess, go ahead and give a nod to their arm and back strength, too.
