The decision by the group that organizes the Grammy Awards to eliminate nearly one-third of the award categories, announced last week, is meeting resistance from musicians and record producers. They complain that the changes were done behind their backs, are meant to cater to the interests of television and major record labels and that they discriminate against ethnic minorities and performers of genres outside the mainstream.

The decision by the group that organizes the Grammy Awards to eliminate nearly one-third of the award categories, announced last week, is meeting resistance from musicians and record producers. They complain that the changes were done behind their backs, are meant to cater to the interests of television and major record labels and that they discriminate against ethnic minorities and performers of genres outside the mainstream.

Jochen Becker, a producer and the president of Zoho, an indie label specializing in jazz and blues that has won two Grammys, each of them in categories that the academy is eliminating, complained that the group had “fixed a problem that none of us here in this room really saw,” adding, “We have gone the wrong way on this.”

The “awards restructuring,” as the academy calls it, reduces the number of Grammy categories to 78 from 109. In addition, it changes some voting procedures and establishes a minimum number of recordings that must be submitted for a musical genre to retain its future place in the lineup.

Mr. Portnow told the musicians that large record labels had no ability to influence the vote and that there was “a much greater level playing field than you would suspect.” He also seemed to be arguing that the committee that cut 31 Grammy categories was acting to preserve the integrity of the awards.

We could end up in five years with 190 categories,” he said, noting that some Grammy winners emerge from a pool of 700 records, while others compete in a group of fewer than 40. “What does the Grammy really mean, then?” he asked.

The changes come after an open letter to the Grammy board written by Steve Stoute, a former record company executive, and published as a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on Feb. 20. In that letter Mr. Stoute complained that “the Grammy Awards have clearly lost touch with contemporary popular culture,” citing three instances: the jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding’s being voted best new artist over Justin Bieber this year; Steely Dan’s being chosen over Eminem in the album of the year competition in 2001; and the jazz pianist Herbie Hancock’s triumphing over Kanye West in the same category in 2008.

“I think the fact that they are cutting categories so drastically tells you they know that they have lost touch,” Mr. Stoute, who worked at Sony and Interscope Records, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “When you control the quintessential award, you have a responsibility to stay in the culture and what’s going on in the marketplace. As music shifts, and taste changes, you have to make sure you are capturing that.”

The groups that seem most aggrieved by the changes are the musicians and producers associated with various genres of Latin music. Four categories popular among the fast-growing Spanish-speaking population in the Southwest and California — banda, norteño, Tejano and regional Mexican — have been merged into two categories, and the award for Latin jazz has been eliminated altogether.

“This is terrible, beyond my comprehension, an insult to our genre and many others,” the pianist Eddie Palmieri, who won Latin jazz Grammys in 2006 and 2007, said in an interview before the Monday meeting. “We fought for 17 years to get this recognition, and then they turn around and take it away without informing anybody what they were up to.”

Latin music has its own showcase in the form of the separate Latin Grammy Awards, established in 2000, but Mr. Palmieri implied that it was a sort of gilded ghetto and called for a greater Hispanic presence at the main event. “There’s no two Oscars, no two Emmys, no two Tonys,” he told the Grammy executives in the meeting.

Several jazz, blues and indie rock performers and record producers also spoke out, motivated by similar concerns.

“I don’t know what it means for us,” the veteran jazz drummer Roy Haynes said before the meeting. “But I do know that the remaining jazz categories are going to be a lot more crowded now, and that it’s going to be harder than ever to win a Grammy.”

Among the categories the academy eliminated are best contemporary jazz album, best traditional blues album, best metal performance and best rock instrumental performance, as well as four classical music categories.

In numerous interviews and blog posts since the changes were announced last week, musicians have argued that the changes are meant primarily to reduce the prospects for independent labels, which Mr. Portnow said now account for half the nominations, and to make the awards ceremony more television friendly.

“Was the show too long?” asked William Spaceman Patterson, a guitarist who has performed or recorded with Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman and Joe Henderson.

The Grammy executives absorbed the criticisms with equanimity. They praised the protesting musicians for their “passion,” urged them to get more involved in the academy’s activities and held out the possibility of restoring some of the categories that have been “merged” — as opposed to being “eliminated” or “deleted,” the preferred terms of the complaining musicians.

“As we said, this is a fluid process,” Mr. Portnow assured the audience. “We may have done some things we want to rethink in a year.”

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