Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees Are Chosen From a Ballot Sent to More Than 1,200 Voters. Here Is How the Ballot Is Built.

Eight nights from now, on November 14, eighteen names join the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles — eight performers, five early influences, four songwriters and producers, and one television host — and every one of them comes off a ballot of 17 names that more than 1,200 voters marked last spring. Forty years ago, on January 23, 1986, the first class walked into the Waldorf-Astoria in New York — Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, James Brown, Ray Charles — off a list drawn up the same way this one was: by a committee, in private, by argument.

A committee of about 30 builds the performer ballot, three committees of six build the other doors, and one door was built for sidemen

Start with the architects, because the Hall always does. The Nominating Committee — about 30 people, drawn from current inductees, artists, historians, journalists and other members of the music industry, chaired by Rick Krim — builds the Performer ballot each year out of the eligible pool. Eligibility is the one hard rule the Hall publishes: a first commercial release at least 25 years before the year of induction, plus demonstrated musical excellence, impact and influence. Krim canvasses the members before they ever sit down, partly so two champions don't spend their slots on the same name.

The other three doors belong to smaller rooms. Three special committees of six people each choose the Early Influence, Musical Excellence and Ahmet Ertegun honorees, and chairman John Sykes sits as the tiebreaker on all three. The Musical Excellence door has the oldest blueprint in the building. In 2000 the Hall created a Sideman category for the session players who built famous records from the second row, and its first class was a rhythm section for the century: Hal Blaine and Earl Palmer on drums, James Jamerson on bass, King Curtis on saxophone, Scotty Moore on guitar. Fifteen players came through it before the category was retired after 2009, and in 2011 the same door reopened as the Award for Musical Excellence, widened to songwriters and producers. The Hall's definition still describes musicians who've "spent their careers out of the spotlight," picked by a separate committee. Blaine's drumming sits under a generation of other people's hits (six thousand sessions carry it; the name on the sleeve was always somebody else's). This year the door admitted Linda Creed, Arif Mardin, Jimmy Miller and Rick Rubin: a Philadelphia soul producer, a longtime Atlantic Records producer, a Rolling Stones producer and the founder of Def Jam — the announcement's own shorthand, and a sideman's résumé written at the top of the credits. The ballot's builders and the building's honorees are the same trade: the people behind the people.

Each member brings two names to a closed room in January, and the meeting runs until the fighting stops

Sykes, who has chaired the Foundation since 2020, describes the January meeting the same way every time he's asked. "I call the annual nominating committee a cross between an intellectual conversation and WWE," he told Vulture. "It's not a beautifully organized or wonderful meeting. It goes on for hours. It all just depends when people decide to stop fighting for their artists they want to get in. This is not something they just think about in the taxi ride over to the meeting. They really come prepared with their artists and why they deserve it."

They prepare for months, and the ration is two names a head. "They only have two choices a piece to present in that room," Sykes told Billboard. "And you've got to go into that room, and you've got to sell it hard. You've got to convince 29 of your peers why your two names deserve to be on the list." No cameras are allowed in. The presentations are the sport: "When you have someone like Tom Morello making a presentation, he's such an eloquent speaker and such a great presenter of creative reasoning as to why an artist should be inducted," Sykes said. "He's a committee member I'd like to have nominate me." Morello sits on the committee as a 2023 inductee with Rage Against the Machine, which means the room holds working musicians arguing discographies against historians arguing canons, and the ballot is whatever survives the collision.

What survived this year was a ballot of 17 names, announced on February 25, with ten first-time nominees on it. The criteria printed with it are the Hall's own: an artist's impact on music culture, influence on other musicians that have followed, and the scope and longevity of a career and a body of work. Sykes presented the list as range on purpose: "This diverse list of talented Nominees recognizes the ever-evolving faces and sounds of Rock & Roll and its continued impact on youth culture."

More than 1,200 voters choose up to seven names each, and the whole fan vote counts as one ballot

The ballot then goes out to an international voting body built from the already-honored: every living inductee, plus historians and members of the music industry, more than 1,200 voters in all. Each may choose up to seven names. The top finishers form the Performer class — eight of the 17 this year — and the Hall publishes no fixed class size, so the census decides how wide the door swings.

The public votes too, in the millions, for one ballot. The fans voted. They voted early. They voted daily, they organized, they cast 9,423,682 votes across 38 days. New Edition took 1,022,683 of them and finished first by a distance. Phil Collins finished second with 900,825. And New Edition isn't in the Class of 2026, because the aggregate fan result is submitted as a single ballot alongside the 1,200-plus (1,022,683 votes, honestly counted, worth exactly one ballot — in this building the currency isn't fandom, it's peerage). Rock Hall president and CEO Greg Harris states the rule without flinching: the fan vote "counts for only one single ballot in the grand scheme of things," and it isn't automatic entry. New Edition is the third fan-vote winner sent home, after the Dave Matthews Band in 2020 and Phish in 2025.

The census's own returns tell the term's story plainly. Iron Maiden came in on a third ballot, after 2021 and 2023. Oasis came in on a third ballot, after 2024 and 2025. Mariah Carey has now stood on three consecutive ballots, 2024, 2025 and 2026, and been passed over on all three. The room builds the ballot, the census grades it, and the grades record the graders' taste as faithfully as the graded.

The special categories answer to committees of six, and this year they corrected the census twice

Fela Kuti stood on the Performer ballot twice, in 2021 and 2022, and the census declined him twice. Gram Parsons stood on it before that and heard the same answer. In 2026 both men entered the Hall anyway, through the Early Influence Award, chosen by a committee of six rather than the 1,200 — joined there by Celia Cruz, Queen Latifah and MC Lyte. Ed Sullivan, whose variety show carried the Beatles and Elvis Presley into American living rooms, took the Ahmet Ertegun Award for non-performers through the third committee. Read the four doors together and the design is honest about itself: the front door measures what the industry thinks of you now, and the side doors exist for the cases where history's verdict and the census's verdict disagree. The Hall keeps widening them. The Class of 2026 holds 18 honorees, the largest since 1987 by Billboard's count, and Sykes doesn't apologize for the size. "We're still playing catch-up," he said.

Phil Collins enters the Hall for the second time, 16 years after the first, and the solo ledger did it alone

Collins has been an inductee since 2010, when he entered with Genesis. As a solo act he'd never stood on the ballot at all until this February — a first-time nominee, 16 years after the Hall had already taken him in with his band — and the first time the room separated the singer from the band, the census graded the solo ledger on its own and passed it: second in the fan vote, and in on the first ballot that carried his name alone. Genesis's frontman and drummer now holds two inductions in two shapes. On the same night, a metal band the census turned away twice, a salsa queen the front door never carried, and a hip-hop group on its first nomination take the same stage in Los Angeles. Different doors, same honor, one ledger. That's the machine working exactly as it's built: argue in January, count in April, correct where counting falls short, and print the whole class where everyone can read it.

The Class of 2026, complete, exactly as the Hall announced it on April 13

Performer Category: - Phil Collins - Billy Idol - Iron Maiden - Joy Division/New Order - Oasis - Sade - Luther Vandross - Wu-Tang Clan

Early Influence Award: - Celia Cruz - Fela Kuti - Queen Latifah - MC Lyte - Gram Parsons

Musical Excellence Award: - Linda Creed - Arif Mardin - Jimmy Miller - Rick Rubin

Ahmet Ertegun Award: - Ed Sullivan