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

HOW many people does it take to make an album?

The answer used to be simple. When the Recording Academy bestowed its first album of the year Grammy in 1959, the award went to the creator of “The Music From Peter Gunn,” Henry Mancini. That was it.

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.

“From what I know,” he says, “Gwen [Stefani] wanted to go all over the place and capture a bunch of different sounds -- that’s why she had so many producers on it. .... There are a lot of different genres. I read somewhere that it was her traveling through time in different periods in life that she was into. That way, getting different producers makes sense.”

Don Was is another old-school guy. His latest productions include the Rolling Stones, Kris Kristofferson and Jessi Colter, and he won his album of the year Grammy for producing Bonnie Raitt’s 1989 hit, “Nick of Time.” But he views the evolution of his field in a broader context.

“It doesn’t bother me at all,” says the academy’s 1994 producer of the year. “Different types of records require different things. There’s a pendulum that swings from artists who have vision and point of view to artists who are great-looking and dance and sing catchy pop songs.... They’re both valid ways of making records.

“And there’s a form of pop music today where the producer is almost an artist,” Was says. “They write the songs, they arrange the songs, they play the instruments, and along with the mixers and engineers they are the ones providing the artistic tone for the record. And when their artistic vision catches on with an audience, they deserve to be rewarded.”

Even a holdout such as Lanois has to admire the efficiency. “It’s kind of interesting, it’s like a factory really,” says Lanois, nominated this year for producing two U2 tracks, as well as for his own album, “Belladonna.”

“I think the volume of work has definitely escalated, but the ratio of amazing stuff to things that will fall by the wayside I think is the same as it’s ever been.... The feel, the vibe is still what people are responding to. For better or worse it’s become easier to create a vibe, because you can just sample an old Joe Tex record, where the vibe is dripping, and people are gonna feel the vibe.... And you add a few things to it.

“It’s a little bit like sneaking in the church at night and cutting out that old Leonardo da Vinci. ‘Well, we couldn’t get the whole thing, we got the arm, but it’s got a vibe -- let’s put a hat on it.’ ”

Degrees of participation

IF the multiple-producer album is the rule for the foreseeable future for a certain breed of artist, maybe the more relevant issue is whether all these participants deserve the same top-tier award.

There’s wide agreement that engineers should be included, assuming, in Lanois’ words, that they were “in the trenches” for the album. But that’s not always necessarily the case, even when it comes to the more prestigious producer credit, and Diane Theriot, the Recording Academy’s senior vice president for awards, acknowledges that some voting members have grumbled to her about it .

Consider Just Blaze, listed as a producer of the Kanye West album for the song “Touch the Sky.”

“Musically, the song was done before [West] even heard it,” Blaze recalls. “I did it about 20 minutes before he got to the studio.... It was 10 minutes’ worth of work and that could be what’s getting me a Grammy.”

That might seem slightly askew, but rules are rules. “It’s not up to us to make that kind of judgment call,” Theriot says. “It becomes very difficult.... Maybe one engineer has one track and a mixer has 12 and we’re giving the same kind of credit....

“We say we’re giving credit to a recording engineer and a mixer, and that’s what we’re doing.”

If you think there’s an excess of engineers up there, it could be worse. The academy goes through the nominated albums’ credits and tries to weed out secondary engineers, giving them a “certificate of participation.”

However many people it takes to make an album, you can count on seeing a lot on stage Wednesday, barring an upset win for Paul McCartney and his tiny team of one producer and two engineers who crafted “Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.”

If Carey wins, says Dupri, “I’m sure that a majority of the producers will go up there. We’ll let her talk but share that Grammy with her. Everybody should go on the stage. That’s a big night.... We’ve got to go up and do it like that until they stop us.”

In fact, although longtime Grammy show producer Ken Ehrlich says nominees have been asked to choose one person to give the acceptance speech, there is nothing preventing all winners from parading up on Wednesday night. That’s in striking contrast with the Academy Awards, which now limits the number of people credited in any given category to three, dramatically reducing the population on stage come award night.

Maybe the Recording Academy will follow suit someday. But don’t hold your breath.

“This is something that we review every year,” says Theriot. “Are we still doing the right thing? We get our producers and engineers involved in these discussions. And it goes through our awards and nominations committees process, and it’s reviewed and talked about.

“It’s still the feeling that for that category, for right now we’re still holding on to that. That doesn’t say it won’t change in the future. But it wouldn’t be something that would change without a tremendous amount of discussion from a lot of people.”

Cromelin is a Times staff writer; Lee is a regular contributor to The Times.