The Recording Academy has announced that the 60th Grammy Awards will take place at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, January 28, 2018, with the telecast to be broadcast live on CBS, marking the first Grammy telecast in New York City since 2003.

The 60th annual GRAMMY Awards will mark the 46th consecutive year that CBS will broadcast the show, and the network has a commitment in place to host it through 2026.

In a new interview with Melinda Newman for Billboard, Recording Academy President/CEO Neil Portnow discussed several factors involved with the Grammy telecast’s return to Madison Square Garden for the first time in 15 years.

“From the time the 45th GRAMMY Awards ended in 2003, I was always thinking about when it would be good and appropriate for us to go back to New York, said Portnow.

“Not only because that’s what we’d done [before], but if you think of half of the Academy’s membership being east of the Mississippi, it always made sense that we’d figure out how to go back.”

Though the Academy’s membership includes representation in Chapter cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, and Miami, taking the GRAMMY Awards telecast back east has financial implications, not only relating to the telecast but the Academy’s slate of GRAMMY Week events.

“The reality is that it’s a major undertaking in many respects,” said Portnow.

“One is that we’re West Coast-based so it means moving essentially a majority or good portion [of the staff] back east. No. 2 is the weather. No. 3 is reinventing not just the Grammy telecast, but the whole week we’ve developed. It’s way more expensive to do anything in New York.”

Though the Grammy Awards are slated to return to Los Angeles in 2019, Portnow says that the organisation’s focus is the milestone 60th telecast.

“Even as we speak there are things that are left to be done, ironed out, and figured out, in terms of going back to Los Angeles, I think that’s a topic for the other side of this adventure, said Portnow.