So many in the mix, what's 1/20th of a Grammy worth?

The album of the year remained an artists-only honor until 1965, when album producers became eligible -- good timing for Sonny Burke, who took one home for his work on Frank Sinatra's "September of My Years."

So it went for decades. But in 2000, 35 album-of-the-year Grammys were handed out for Santana's "Supernatural." OutKast's "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below" generated 20 winners in 2004. And if Mariah Carey or Gwen Stefani wins this year's Grammy on Wednesday, the singers could be joined by 20 to 30 fellow recipients on the Staples Center stage.

That can make for a festive mob on Grammy night, but as the celebrations get bigger, this development has created ripples of uneasiness in some quarters.

Are there just too many people up there? Do all equally deserve one of the highest honors the academy presents? And at a time when the traditional music business is fighting to survive, does the crowd on the platform present an alienating symbol of an impersonal, recording-by-committee mentality?

"I love music in pure form, and let's not forget that they're called 'records' because it's a record of an event that actually happened," says Daniel Lanois, whose six Grammys include one for producer of the year and two for album of the year (U2's "The Joshua Tree" and Bob Dylan's "Time Out of Mind").

"How did we evolve so far away from that?" adds Lanois. "At a certain point you have to question the matchmaking efforts. 'What engineer shall we fly in?' and 'Who's gonna be the ProTools guy?' And then we have a runner, then there'll be an assistant, then of course there's a manager, then there's a lawyer, then the accountant calls...."

OutKast member Andre 3000, a nominee this year for producing two songs on Stefani's "Love. Angel. Music. Baby.," somewhat shares the sentiment.

"I'm a fan of when people just worked with one producer," he says. "If it was my world, I would love to not work with artists unless I could do the whole album.... But I think record companies just want to win -- to get the best of what's going on at the time."

Recognition for the team

THIS explosion of nominees stems from the academy's decision in 1999 to enfranchise the engineers and mixers who previously toiled in anonymity or at least without the prospect of an album of the year trophy for their efforts. (The same policy applies to the record of the year award.)

That expansion coincided with an increasing tendency among performers to assemble their albums using many production teams. Carey's "The Emancipation of Mimi" has 22 producers and engineers nominated for Grammys while 26 are in the running on Stefani's collection.

This trend clearly rubs old-school music romantics such as Lanois the wrong way, but it might be a stretch to blame it for some of the music business' sales woes. For one thing, the Carey and Stefani albums have bucked the tide, selling 5.1 million and 3.6 million copies, respectively. Clearly, their fans don't have a problem with it.

"In creating albums recently, people have been getting lots of producers," notes Jermaine Dupri, the main producer on Carey's album and Virgin Records' president of urban music. "You got different producers who are hot -- myself, the Neptunes, Jimmy [Jam] and Terry [Lewis], blah blah blah....

"They want to make their album a rounded-out record. Most of the time that's how they end up looking -- like a guest list of producers.... It's like, 'Who did that record I just heard on the radio? Let's get him.' "

But is it really fair to presume that using multiple producers is solely a strategy to get hits? There might be some old-fashioned rock snobbery at work here, because most of the targets for such criticism work in the more commercial-minded pop field. You don't hear the same complaints about U2, which will have a party of 15 winners (including Lanois) if "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" wins.

"With rock bands, they're self-contained units, and they tend to want to go in and work with one person," says Capitol Records President Andy Slater, who has produced albums by Fiona Apple and Macy Gray.

"But maybe in the other genres those artists see the construction of their records as not exclusive to one producer's particular sound....I still feel like that record has to hold together as some kind of novel at the end of the day; it has to take you somewhere and not throw you into five different short stories that are strung together.

"And depending on who's involved, you can get the feeling that you're going through the artist's vision equally as well with the right set of artists and producers."

Just Blaze, a producer nominee for Kanye West's "Late Registration," generally favors fewer producers on a project but says sometimes there's an artistic reason to branch out.