AI is blowing up music. How should the Grammys handle it?

I last talked to Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr in 2024 — when it was obvious that generative AI would upend the music industry, but not exactly clear how that would happen. Now, Harvey says AI is “omnipresent” in music production. So what kinds of tools are musicians using, in what way, and what kind of music is it making for us? Is it any good? And how do we identify, and take care of, actual human musicians in this mess? Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr | Decoder Is ‘blue dot fever’ a real problem for the concert industry? | Los Angeles Times USA v. LiveNation-Ticketmaster: All the news | The Verge The future of country music is here, and it’s AI | The Verge Poll: AI is transforming how we think about music | Hollywood Reporter Inside the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ era of AI in music | Rolling Stone Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking to Harvey Mason Jr., the CEO of The Recording Academy. That's the outfit that puts on the Grammy Awards. I last talked to Harvey in 2024, when it was obvious that generative AI would upend the music industry, but not exactly clear how or how fast that would happen. Well, it's been 18 months since that conversation, and you're going to hear Harvey say that AI is now, quote, "omnipresent in music production." And Harvey knows who he's talking about. He is himself a legendary music producer who's worked with everyone from Michael Jackson to Beyonce. I've heard Harvey say that every session he's been in recently has had AI in it. And I really wanted to know what that meant. What kinds of tools are musicians using? In what way? And what

• 2:14Speaker 04

  kind of music is it making for us? Is that any good? Because as it stands, there's an exponential increase in the rate of AI music creation. The streaming platform Deezer has reported that more than 50,000 AI-generated songs are being uploaded every day. And all that AI-generated music is getting harder to identify and filter out. While at the same time, tools like Suno have become mainstream parts of the creative process for musicians of all kinds. So I really wanted to know what Harvey's experience is with all that looked like, and how he balances all that against his role running the Grammy Awards, especially since the Recording Academy's rules say that AI music isn't eligible for the industry's highest honors. As you can tell, there's a lot going on in this one. Harvey and I also talked about the Grammys moving to Disney after years in CBS, and

• 2:58Speaker 04

  what it means to reach new, younger audiences with award shows in the age of TikTok. If you're a Decoder listener, you know that I'm always saying whatever happens to the music industry, happens to everything else five years later. And this conversation really highlights that. Okay, Harvey Mason Jr., the CEO of the Recording Academy, on the future of AI in music. Here we go.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  Harvey Mason Jr., your songwriter, your producer, and your CEO of the Recording Academy. Welcome back to Decoder.

• 3:35Speaker 05

  Thank you. Good to be here, man.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  I'm excited to talk to you. It's been about a year and a half since you're on the show. A lot has happened.

• 3:40Speaker 05

  A lot.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  In a year and a half. I actually just want to start with like a lightning round of the Decoder questions asked. I raise CEO of the same questions.

• 3:47Speaker 05

  Okay, let's go.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  But I have so much on my list that I'm just gonna just do a check-in.

• 3:51Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  On whether these things have changed. You're CEO of the Recording Academy. That's the organization that puts on the Grammys. You run music cares or charities. It's kind of the social support system for most of the musicians in the United States. How is the Recording Academy structured? How many people work there? And has it changed at all the past year and a half?

• 4:07Speaker 05

  It's definitely changed. We continue to grow and progress and try and do more, reach more people. As you said, we serve music and all the people that make it in a lot of different ways through our Grammy organization, which includes the museum, the Grammy Museum, Music Cares, as you mentioned, our advocacy efforts in DC and state lawmaker, working with state lawmakers around the country, and then, of course, the Grammy Show. And so we're a little over 300 people, so it's not a massive organization, but we punch above our weight and we do a lot of work and we're very active. The way that it's changed is, I think we're doing a good job of keeping up with the changes that are happening, and that is nonstop, especially with technology, new styles of delivering

• 4:50Speaker 05

  music, creating music, consuming music, and then also trying to make sure that we're staying in tune or relevant with what's happening in music genres, things that are happening, way things are, new popularity comes up, people are consuming different styles of music, music from different parts of the world. All those are things that are ever-changing, and I love that our organization is moving quickly and staying ahead of a lot of those things.

• 5:15Speaker 06

  Are you investing more on the policy side, on the production side, where you're saying you're changing? What specifically part is growing?

• 5:21Speaker 05

  One of the things that really is going to affect the big change is our partnership with Disney ABC. We were at CBS for 50 something years, and so for the first time this year, we will be with Disney ABC, and that gives us the ability to do so much more, as you said, investing in content, storytelling. We have more opportunities for using our Grammy brand and to tell music stories in different ways, documentaries, scripted, other forms of music content, because Disney, as our partner, just has an appetite for more of that than we had previously. So that will be a change. We've created Grammy Studios, which is exciting. That'll be our arm to create a lot of that content, and we're really approaching a content-first strategy. So when we're doing events, or we're doing masterclasses, or we're doing Grammy houses around the world, we're going to be filming them and creating

• 6:06Speaker 05

  content around those.

• 6:07Speaker 06

  The other question I ask every CEO comes on is about decision-making. What's your framework for making a decision? I'm just going to tell you, 18 months ago when you were on the show, you said you like to think a lot and then make a decision really fast. Has your framework changed at all?

• 6:18Speaker 05

  No, if I didn't include the collaborative approach of decision making, I was probably thinking too fast and you might have caught me on lightning round, but a big part of my decision making is gathering information from people that I trust and people that are around me and people that are experts, because I don't pretend to be the expert in every department of what we do. I do think I have a great group of people that give a lot of different insight, diverse perspectives and really specialized thinking. And I came from sports. I played basketball, as you know. I'm a songwriter, as you know, and those are team efforts. You write songs together. You're not sitting in a room all by yourself, at least the way that I work. You do that with other people and the best idea wins.

• 7:02Speaker 05

  And same for sports. You have a role on a team. If you're great at that one role, you do that. You don't try and do everything. So that has always been my style of leadership or decision making.

• 7:12Speaker 06

  Describe that structure. You say you have a group of people around you, Recording Academy is about 300 people. Just how is that structured? How many people work for you and then what roles do they play in the larger organization?

• 7:21Speaker 05

  So we have a president, we have a chief of strategy, I have a chief of staff, we have different department heads. I have about 12 people reporting to me at this time and we've gone back and forth on that number and it changes from time to time. I've done a couple reorganizations over the six years now that I've been in the role. And each of those department heads manages, obviously, a department, but they all kind of report up to me and we ultimately have meetings to make the decisions that we think are the most important. Right now, we're undergoing a strategic plan build, which is, I think, incredible and it's been an amazing process for our organization. Each of the department heads is bringing ideas and we're coming up with objectives and goals and real strategies

• 8:03Speaker 05

  to accomplish those goals. That's been a really, I really enjoyed the process. And then, of course, budgeting against that is another thing that's going to be a fun challenge for us. So we're right in the middle of that process.

• 8:14Speaker 06

  The reason I ask all this is, I feel like if we rewound the clock five, 10 years ago, I could sort of understand the music industry. And my thesis on the show is

• 8:25Speaker 06

  If you pay attention to what happens to the music industry, you will know what will happen to every other creative industry five years from now. It's always fastest in music to change. Five years ago, okay, we've come through the shift to streaming. Artists understand they're gonna get paid pennies on the dollar for from Spotify, even if they get a billion streams. We gotta find other revenue lines. We're gonna do sync licenses. We're everyone's gonna do a Keds ad. We're gonna be on tour all day and all night.

• 8:50Speaker 05

  Keds ad, that's a deep cut, but thank you.

• 8:52Speaker 06

  You know, you know it. Now, it's like, that's all upended, right? So I want to ask you about the vibes in the industry right now. And it's not just AI that's upending the industry. I'm reading the, you know, the music press this past week. Everyone's talking about blue dot fever, right? This notion that there are blue dots and all the Ticketmaster seating charts represent empty seats and big artists are canceling tours. You got Meghan Trainor, the Puss Cat Dolls, Post Malone just canceled about six dates. Are the vibes? Well, first of all, I'm just curious, do you think blue dot fever is real?

• 9:20Speaker 05

  I do. I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but from what I'm reading, and probably reading a lot of the same thing you are, it seems like it's a very, very serious issue. And it seems like we've been trying to deal with ticketing issues for some time now. And there's some discrepancies on the information that we're hearing. Hopefully, we can get to the bottom of some of it. Obviously, there's, there's legal cases going on. But the vibes in the industry, from what I'm seeing are, there's a lot of trepidation. There's a lot of concern. There's fears around some of the ticketing issues, but also AI. And I'm sure that's the topic that is at the tip of everyone's tongue. But I also see a lot of opportunity. There's more music being created, more music being listened to.

• 10:03Speaker 05

  There is a lot of live opportunities out there. I know you mentioned some that have been canceled, but there's others that are doing really, really well. I was just at Coachella last or a couple of weeks ago. I mean, what a, what a spectacle, what an amazing event and series of events. And now you see they've sold out for next year without even announcing a lineup. So there are things that are working really, really well.

• 10:23Speaker 06

  The reason I'm pushing and starting with live is I, again, five, 10 years ago, I think the industry figured it out, right? Okay, there's stuff we can monetize and there's stuff we can't. And the idea that the music itself was hard to monetize. I think that was a paradigm shift in the industry.

• 10:39Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 10:40Speaker 06

  Right. You're gonna make a, you're gonna cut a record and that thing is not gonna make you all the money. Unless you're at the very top of the game.

• 10:45Speaker 05

  Right.

• 10:45Speaker 06

  It's all the other stuff that's gonna make you money. That pressure has led to rising ticket prices. Post-COVID, right? Everyone's gonna be on tour forever.

• 10:55Speaker 05

  But also the demand has led to some rising ticket prices. I think there's a high demand to see a lot of artists, depending on who it is. And again, you've said some artists that didn't have as much success selling, but there've been other events where money's not even the object. People just wanna go see great entertainers and great music. So I think it's a combination of both.

• 11:16Speaker 06

  Do you think ticket prices are just gonna keep going up? I kinda worry that ticket prices are just gonna keep going up.

• 11:20Speaker 05

  Well, considering what's happened to other commodities or other things in our world that we live in, doesn't seem like there's any end in sight. You look at gas, you look at food, you look at rent, the cost of living. I hope that ticket prices find some kind of a level, because I would hate that to be an experience that only certain people got to take advantage of. I think music and watching music and being entertained by songwriters and creators and singers, that's a part of who we are and that's stuff that we need just to feel human and to feel alive and to be able to find that common ground with other people. So I would like to think we find a way to allow people to go to concerts.

• 12:04Speaker 05

  But again, if you look at where we're headed as a society, it just seems like the cost of things is running away from us.

• 12:12Speaker 06

  Right next to that, there's a big lawsuit against Ticketmaster. The federal government settled. Ticketmaster agreed to some changes already with the federal government. That settlement, I think the state attorney's general did not think was strong enough. They pursued the case. They've won. Something else is gonna happen. Do you see the Ticketmaster case having an impact already? And do you see a bigger impact in the future?

• 12:32Speaker 05

  I definitely think it's going to have an impact. I think it is going to depend on how it plays out. There's still a couple of rounds left in that, from what I can tell and what I'm hearing. Once that shakes out, then we'll be able to see what the effect will be.

• 12:45Speaker 06

  The reason I'm starting with live is because I feel like live, it was understood how to make money in live.

• 12:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 06

  And that is kind of shaky right now. The idea that tours are getting canceled or we're oversupplying a market with rising costs and people are going to pick gas and groceries or seeing their favorite artists. That's unsettling, I think, in the industry.

• 13:02Speaker 05

  But I also think that's going to be such an appealing proposition, live events, more in the future than even now. I would bet that depending on ticket prices and accessibility, of course, things are to be considered. People are going to want to go see live music. They're going to want live experiences. You're seeing more and more people on computers and phones and AI and the way they're working remotely. I personally believe being together, like we're doing this podcast, is much better than doing it on Zoom. Listening to music is going to be much better for people than just doing it on headphones. They want to be somewhere where you can be among your peers, among people that love the same music and feel that, experience it. Again, I was at Coachella.

• 13:47Speaker 05

  I felt that there's nothing like going to a live concert. So I truly believe, yes, there's lots to sort out, whether that's the legal issues or the ticket pricing or the bots and the blue dots and all the different things, but people are going to want to see live music.

• 14:01Speaker 06

  How long did it take you to plan your Coachella outfits?

• 14:03Speaker 05

  Zero minutes.

• 14:06Speaker 06

  I watched Coachella from social media and I was like, oh, there's a whole other thing happening here.

• 14:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 06

  That's kind of the other dynamic, right? Is that the music industry has gotten way more commercial, right? Coachella is influencer Olympics. It has all of the brand activations. There's something there, right? Where it's, okay, the money has to come from somewhere. It's going to come from credit card companies or travel agencies or whatever is happening, brand activations.

• 14:28Speaker 05

  Packaging, yeah.

• 14:30Speaker 06

  Tell me about that vibe right now, is we have to commercialize the industry in order to support these artists.

• 14:34Speaker 05

  I don't know if it's a great thing or a horrible thing. I can't tell, but it's definitely happening and it is a way for artists to make additional revenue. But it all stems from the music. Music is driving so much of this and the culture around it is so important. And that's why I love the work that I do, because I get to be around those people. And if you can figure out how to- Package up all the different things you just talked about, the ancillary revenue opportunities. You have to remember back at the source, it's the music, it's the songwriting, it's the performing, it's the recording. And that's why, to me, the academy is so important because we're continuing to push, to advocate and support those opportunities for our music people. So, yeah, I love all the different things that people figured out how they, you know,

• 15:15Speaker 05

  how they make money and how they monetize music or performances or live or merch. Even food, you see food coming together with music, you see sports coming together with music. Those are great things, those things make me excited because of my passion for music and music people.

• 15:29Speaker 06

  Again, the reason I'm starting here is because I want to ground the conversation with AI. I feel all that pressure in the music industry, I can see all those gears turning. And then, right next to that, AI is upending the process of songwriting, the process of producing music. And I do think it is happening faster in the music industry than other creative pursuits. You can just see it happening every single day in music.

• 15:51Speaker 05

  Music people are pretty quick to jump on, on new technologies and we adapt relatively quickly, I think. And you're going to see it have an impact across all creativity and different art forms, I'm quite certain. But as you said, music people are early and it's had an impact already and I'm sure we're going to dive into it.

• 16:11Speaker 06

  We need to take a quick break, we'll be right back.

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• 17:59Speaker 04

  We're back with Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr., ready to dive into how AI is changing the music industry.

• 18:08Speaker 06

  So the last time you were on the show, I'll just read you some of the quotes. "I don't think you can tell me that AI can create songs in the key of life, never mind are dramatic." And then you said, "It's all going to be a mess until we get it sorted out, because yes, it's difficult." It's been 18 months. Has your thinking evolved dramatically on how AI can deliver quality? And how musicians should use it?

• 18:26Speaker 05

  It has, honestly. And it's crazy. I never thought it would change. But actually, that's not true. I knew it was going to change because it's all been changing so fast. But the quality of what it's able to create has improved dramatically. I remember 18 months ago, you could tell when something was AI-generated. And now it's to the point where people are playing me things and telling me that AI made it and I'm surprised and I'm impressed at the quality of it. And all that scares me because I do represent our roughly 30,000 music people and then millions of music people around the world that have grown up their whole lives trying to figure

• 19:05Speaker 05

  out how to express themselves by using a guitar or a keyboard and writing their heartfelt lyrics. And now you can prompt some of that stuff and it's darn good, which I don't know if I love or don't love, but it's evolved over the last 18 months.

• 19:23Speaker 06

  You're a producer and a songwriter. You're still a working producer and a songwriter and you're still in sessions. You gave a quote in January. You said, "I've seen AI in every studio and every session. I'm not remembering a song. I've been around a room I've been in that was not using some form of AI." I have been mulling that quote since January when you said it on stage. I've been dying to have you in this chair to ask you about that quote. How is it being used? How is it changing the process of songwriting from your vantage point as a producer and a songwriter? And then obviously as somebody who represents the interest of all the songwriters.

• 19:56Speaker 05

  So the quote, let me address that first of all, because I work in pop music generally, pop, R&B. And in those genres of music, I think it's pretty omnipresent. There's other genres that are not that way. So I don't want to mischaracterize it because what I do and what I see may not be everyone else's experience. But when I'm in a room, AI is generally always there. It's being used to create chord progressions. It's being used to fill out drum loops. Some people are just creating entire tracks using AI. Others are using AI to come up with lyrics. Maybe they've written a few lines in the first verse. They want the second verse to have the same rhyme scheme and rhythm and they'll just send in, enter the first one and say, "Make a new one for the second one." Some people are putting in a title and it's giving out ideas.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  And some of them are just using it as a rhyming dictionary, but AI is across so many different aspects of songwriting right now. Definitely people are using it to create background vocals, to make stacks, to create demos of singers that they may be writing a song for. It's a pretty wild, the power of AI. And how I feel about it is I have mixed emotions. I am definitely. Disturbed by the fact that I worked my whole entire life and all the people that I work with have been grinding for years in studios and in bedrooms on laptops and with instruments to try and figure out how to make great art. And now there's a possibility of people doing that that have not put in the work

• 21:26Speaker 05

  or don't have the same passion and they can just type in a prompt and create a song. I talk a lot about my niece. She does a lot of AI creating and she sends songs to my wife and says, look at the song I wrote. She's in sixth grade. And so it's definitely, it's a, it's a challenge for me, but I also have to understand, both in my role as a producer and my role as a CEO, there's got to be a balance because AI is here, people are going to use it, there's going to, there's competition out there. Songwriters, artists, producers, they're all competing for a certain amount of ears. And a lot of them, they don't care how they get to those ears, they just want to get to them. So I am struggling with making sure we're preserving human creativity while also allowing

• 22:09Speaker 05

  technology to evolve the craft and the art form of creating and writing songs. So it's not an easy struggle for me because I am a creator, but I'm also overseeing or trying to help serve music people in the music community in my role as CEO.

• 22:22Speaker 06

  You mentioned genres. We did a story a while ago, our great friend Charlie Harding wrote about AI in the country music industry. And the country music industry is an industry. It's more structured than other kinds of music.

• 22:32Speaker 05

  Very different.

• 22:33Speaker 06

  Songwriters, there are session musicians, there are track players, it's a, it's a machine. And he was like, AI is showing up in structured ways here, right? And the idea that people are going to make a demo track for an artist, that's going away because the songwriters can just say, make me a song that sounds like whatever country artist and I'll pitch it to them directly with their voice. And none of the artists would cop to it, but we heard it from all these songwriters. Yeah, we're just using the artists' voices.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 22:57Speaker 06

  There's a real dynamic there, right? That is spreading to other parts of the music industry. Pop music, as you mentioned, it's starting to use it, but it's not as structured, it's not as controlled. How do you see that diffusion happening across genres?

• 23:08Speaker 05

  Well, I'm a little surprised, to be honest, that it is, is permeating the country scene. I would think that would be one of the last to accept, you know, AI or any input from it.

• 23:18Speaker 06

  Oh, I have a very different view of country music and how how commercial.

• 23:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:22Speaker 06

  I think there's an image and I think there's an industry.

• 23:25Speaker 05

  A reality.

• 23:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:26Speaker 05

  Well, I've definitely witnessed some people in that space using AI. You have to figure out how you're going to use it. Is it going to be a tool or is it going to be a replacement? And that is going to change per industry. I've seen people who are doing film scores now using it in a way that I never imagined. You know, they're playing individual instrument lines into, you know, the generative platform. And then that will in turn create a full arrangement. So maybe you're playing a line on a piano and then it turns into strings and violins and violas and cellos and basses and it splits it out on a score. And then they'll just hire the orchestras to play it, but they will not have to do any of the arranging or the composing or even making charts. It's doing all that for you.

• 24:08Speaker 05

  So you're going to see it used different ways and different forms of music making, which you're already seeing, as you said, in country versus pop versus composing.

• 24:17Speaker 06

  I'm going to read you some stats that I think are just fascinating. The Hollywood Reporter just did a big AI and music polls. It's from last fall, but it tracks with the polling that we've seen more recently. Most people, 52%, do not want to listen to music made with the help of AI. 66% of people said they've never listened to music knowing it was made by AI. I don't know if you can do that anymore, but that's what they said. And then there's a lot of data that just says people dislike AI generally.

• 24:40Speaker 05

  But you have to look at who they're asking and who are the people that are filling out those surveys and who are the people that subscribe to their magazine or will look at their website. As you get into younger people, I would imagine those numbers might change.

• 24:54Speaker 06

  So younger people, this is polling that we have cited a lot on this show and across the verge, younger people, the more they use AI, the more they dislike it. So Gen Z has this like ferocious dislike for AI. I bring this up not to litigate the poll numbers with you. I'm just curious about the the sort of widespread use of AI and the knowledge that most artists have that their fans don't want them to say they're using AI. So Michelle Lewis told Rolling Stone that music industry has a quote, "Don't ask, don't tell" policy about AI music. Suno CEO, it's one of the big generative AI platforms, maybe the dominant one. Mikey Schulman said Suno is the Ozempic of the music industry. Everybody's on it. Nobody wants to talk about it. That's the gap, right? Everyone's using the tools. Everyone sees the power of the tools, but we cannot tell our fans straight out that we're using AI to make the music.

• 25:39Speaker 06

  Do you see that gap closing or do you see it widening?

• 25:41Speaker 05

  I don't know. I don't know if it's going to close or widen. For us at the Academy, we are in a challenging position because we have to award excellence in music. And we are now every year deciding what is going to be the threshold of acceptability for AI. And so that's going to probably have an effect on how the gap widens or closes, because we ask, when you submit, did you use AI? But acknowledging it's like Ozempic, some people are going to tell you they're on it, some people are not. So it's a little bit of taking people's word for it. Until we can find the technology or deploy the technology, which I know is supposedly out there, that

• 26:23Speaker 05

  can determine when AI is being used, how much it's being used. We are a little bit at the mercy of people telling us and disclosing when they're using it. So we'll see what the perception is. And as people become more comfortable, you know, in the history of humanity, I think we've had a pattern of becoming much more comfortable with new technology as we've used it and it's been a part of our society. And it doesn't usually take us very long. I remember people that I was with saying, I'm never putting my credit card on the internet. That's ridiculous. Or I've even met people in the music space who said they'd never use Pro Tools, or AutoTune, or Melodyne, or some of the other things that have developed and allowed us to be more creative and more efficient with our creativity. So we'll see what happens. Again, in 18 months, we should talk again, and we'll see how people are feeling.

• 27:08Speaker 06

  You see the recent sort of social media discourse about whether death of AutoTune had held up as an idea from Jay-Z. It's like now it's everywhere. It didn't actually die. It took over everything.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  It took over everything. Yeah, I haven't seen that, but it's a funny subject to think about.

• 27:22Speaker 06

  I got big artists saying, basically, adapt or die. Diplo, I can get the best voice from AI. I don't need anybody to sing the song anymore. Literally, he said, adapt or become an Uber driver. Timbaland is doing straight AI artists. He's got an entire record labeled for his AI artists. 50 Cent just loves posting memes of like soul covers of 50 Cent songs. Grimes exists. Taran Southern is out there. What's your take on it's the bigger artists who are going to adopt AI faster because they have the name recognition. They can put out AI music and people will listen to it because it is 50 Cent or Grimes or whoever. And the younger artists are struggling for attention because they're swamped on social channels full of slop.

• 28:02Speaker 05

  Some big artists will adopt, others are going to reject.

• 28:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 05

  And I think it's very similar to The other tiers of music creators, some young new artists are going to see it as an advantage and they're going to want to use AI because they can create faster, they can create more things. And some are gonna, you know, rebuff the whole idea of using technology like that to create. And I don't think you're gonna find any one size fits all. And that's what's gonna be cool, or I think somewhat acceptable about it. I am always gonna advocate for humans, and I think that's still gonna be an important part of the art form is, how do we express ourselves as, as a society, as humans, as interacting with each other and talking about that human experience? That's how we, that's how we communicate. That's how we feel each other. That's how we come together. So I think that's

• 28:50Speaker 05

  always gonna be important. The other thing that's gonna be important is, humans are gonna create the coolest, newest stuff. I don't, AI, I don't think, 18 months, we can talk again. I don't think AI is gonna go out ahead of us and beat us at coming up with a new sound, a new genre, something that's fresh and exciting, and that lands and that resonates with listeners. They will, at some point, maybe figure out how to do that. But what they're gonna do now is they're gonna listen to all the cool stuff that we make, and then they're gonna iterate on that. And they're gonna probably add a little twist here, and they're gonna mash some stuff together and come out with a new song, or a new voice, or a new singing. But as humans, and as creators who are living life and experiencing things, we are gonna be the ones that push the art form forward. I truly

• 29:32Speaker 05

  believe that. This month, we'll see. So you'll, you'll have both. You'll have people using AI and just creating a whole bunch of music, and you'll have other people say, I, I wanna do it my way. I wanna create through my experience and through my pain and through my, my interactions. And that'll be cool.

• 29:50Speaker 06

  So you were talking earlier about how to win a Grammy, you gotta certify that you made it with human. You only wanna give the award to the human part of the music. That's obviously getting fuzzier. You're describing it getting fuzzier. If Diplo submits a track, and he's like, all the backing vocals are AI.

• 30:05Speaker 05

  It's okay.

• 30:06Speaker 06

  That's okay.

• 30:07Speaker 05

  AI doesn't make you ineligible. It doesn't exclude you from the process. We just have to make sure that the human creativity is at the forefront. And there is human creativity. So if somebody submits songs with AI background vocals, they're not going to get a Grammy, or they won't even be eligible for a Grammy for performance because AI is doing the performing. But you can still submit for songwriting or some of the other categories. And conversely, if AI has written the song, but you have a human singing it and they sang the heck out of it, that person can be submitted for a performance award. And we acknowledge, and this is why it's a fine line. It's we're walking the tightrope right now. We want to make sure we're honoring human creativity. We want to honor excellence. We have to acknowledge that AI is being used.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  And at some point, we'll have to decide, do we want to completely ban AI from the process? And say, if you used AI at all, you are excluded from the Grammy process. Or we're going to say AI is the next version of a tool for music making. And people are using it in different ways. Some of them really interesting and creative. Some of them seem egregious and too much. And we're going to have to find that sweet spot. And that's what we're doing every single year. We review this policy. We look at it and make sure that we're doing the thing that our board of trustees and our members and our creative community want. Because we listen to our creative community. So that's what I see the future is navigating that. And I think it's going to evolve over time.

• 31:29Speaker 06

  Where's the line right now? Is it how much is too much?

• 31:32Speaker 05

  It's right now, we call it more than the minimum amount of human creativity involved in the process. So as long as you can show that a human was involved and it wasn't just a tiny amount, then we will say it's acceptable. But as soon as it gets beyond that point of no or not enough human interaction, then we have to pull back. And it's not a perfect system. I mean, this is a very, very tough system to create. Because again, we don't know exactly the percentage of human creativity or human interaction. We don't have the ability to determine that today. I hope that we do in the future. We acknowledge that it is not the most perfect system. And music, by the way, is subjective, as you know. So we're evaluating and trying to award something that means something different to everybody. So.

• 32:18Speaker 05

  We just want to try and get it right. We want to try and celebrate music and music people in all the different forms of it. And we, at this point, are acknowledging that AI is a tool that is that is being used. We also, at some point, we should talk about the legislation because we need guardrails. We need people telling us and us enforcing the rules around how AI can be used.

• 32:41Speaker 06

  I know you've you've been advocating for a specific litigation. I do want to come to that. I just want to stay on this aspect of it for one second. You're saying to win a Grammy award, you need to show us somehow that there's more than a de minimis amount of human involvement. I can't just prompt Suno to make a hit record. Make a song like Harvey would make for Janet Jackson, which actually sounds like a great Suno prompt, and I might do that when I get out of here. Okay, that's not enough. How do you prove it? Do you have to submit paperwork? Do you have to submit screenshots? Like, what's the proof?

• 33:08Speaker 05

  Well, we have screening committees that that review and evaluate people's claims. And at some point, it does come down to people's opinions and people doing the analysis and asking questions, asking for proof, asking for documentation. We're not always going to get that. We're going to try. And as I said, it's not a perfect science. We don't have a black and white determining, you know, box that you can check that's exactly proved that you've done what you've said you've done. But I know that our community is an honorable community. People who make music are, you know, creators are are different people. I don't think anybody wants to cheat and win a Grammy on on grounds that they that they they can't prove. And I would hate to think that somebody would want to do that.

• 33:53Speaker 05

  Maybe it happens and hopefully we'll find, we'll catch them before it does. But it's just not the perfect system. It's going to be challenging to determine exactly who did what. And until we can get the technology that breaks it down for us, we're going to have to rely on our community to be forthcoming.

• 34:07Speaker 06

  I feel like we're having this like deep conversation about the artistic process and creativity and vibes, and I'm just hitting you with stat after stat. Deezer says 50,000 AI-generated songs we're going to upload to their platform every day. You're describing a process where a bunch of people get together and they look at all the submissions to the Grammys and that whatever evidence and they do some process. Are you going to get overwhelmed with the amount of AI material that's coming your way?

• 34:32Speaker 05

  We'll see. So far, we haven't. We had about 24,000 submissions last year. Now it's up a little bit from the year before, and we'll see what happens this year. And if that starts to happen, then we'll have to make changes. The cool thing about our organization, at least over the last five or six years, is we've really been quick to change. We're watching what's happening. We're listening. We're hearing from our music people. And we're saying, how can we make sure we're doing this the right way? So if we start to get overwhelmed and AI becomes an issue for us, and we can't determine what's happening, and we're getting inundated, or the whole thing is getting diluted by AI, then we're going to make some changes. But right now, I think we're in a pretty good spot.

• 35:10Speaker 06

  There are other parts of the industry that are attempting to do the same things. Spotify, for example, wants to change its royalty structures to account for AI music. They have a label now, like a human-certified label. Does that align with your thinking? Is there a more holistic approach across the industry that will help with this?

• 35:27Speaker 05

  That would be great. And I know a lot of us are talking amongst ourselves about how can we align? And how can we build some of those processes and lanes for separation? I also think that's going to evolve over time. And as we start talking, it is a deep conversation, philosophical thought. At some point, is it as important to determine what is synthetic or AI-generated? And what is 50% generated? What is 0% generated? And at some point, consumers start to wear down and tire a little bit of that and just say, I just want to hear great music. I'm not sure that I care about the tools so much right now. And then it leaves it to us on the backend to make sure we're protecting human creativity.

• 36:09Speaker 05

  I'm not sure 18 months from now, maybe we will, we'll be more concerned about it. But maybe we'll be less, and it'll be like drum machines. And you'll say, some AI was used in this recording, but do I care? And I care as the CEO of the Grammys, and I care representing human music people. And again, we're going to have to, in the background, continue to fight and push and advocate for human creativity. But consumers... Aren't worried right now if a vocal has autotune on it. They're not thinking about if the strings are real strings in the ballad that they just listened to and that they love. So I'm not sure I have the answer, but we're going to see how it changes over time and how consumers' appetite for different forms of creativity and different tools being used in that process play out.

• 36:55Speaker 06

  There was a time when people really cared about autotune, right? Like, shares, producers lied about using autotune on belief, right? Like, that used to be a thing that they would literally lie about because they didn't want anyone to know how they'd done it, or it caught to it. And you're saying that's going to fade away with AI, the same way it's faded away with...

• 37:11Speaker 05

  I'm not certain it's going to. I'm going to say that's an option, that it could. People become normalized to it and they just want to hear great music. They're not concerned about the tools as much. But in saying that, I have to, again, reiterate that my belief is that humans and human creativity is always going to be important, is always going to be the most desirable, and always be the thing that pushes the art form forward.

• 37:30Speaker 06

  I like your optimism. My pushback here is drum machines, for the most part, were not made by defense contractors. Like, maybe Yamaha had some sort of defense contractor, but like, for the most part, the instrument companies, the sampler companies, Pioneer was not making military targeting systems, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, all the big model companies are defense contractors. Like, they're caught up in like, government, like, top of the government controversies every single day. They're asking everyone for billions, if not trillions of dollars, we're going to put the data centers in space. And at least from my perspective, it seems like the interests of artists and creatives,

• 38:14Speaker 06

  authors, are, they know it's bad, but they're like, hold on, we got to do, we have war. We're going to do war with the AI models. We're going to argue about cybersecurity, because maybe we're going to crash the whole world. Have they been responsive to you? The last time you were on the show, I asked if you met with Sam Altman. You're like, I'm hoping to. Have you met with him since?

• 38:30Speaker 05

  I haven't met with him directly, but I have met with his team and people from Open and from Claude. And we're doing a lot of talking and definitely the other platforms, Suno and Udio and others. So the dialogues are ongoing. And from my perspective, or at least maybe I'm overly optimistic. I know I probably am. You already told me I am today.

• 38:51Speaker 06

  I appreciate it.

• 38:51Speaker 05

  But I, I think everybody wants to do this the right way. And maybe they're tricking me. From what I can tell, they realize the importance of music and creativity. And nobody wants to append that completely. At least the music people that I talked to that are running those companies, they're fans and they love music and they love creativity. And they want to add to that ecosystem. So we'll see where it goes. I am optimistic, but I think my optimism comes more from the fact that I know our community and I know music people. I know how we think. I also know how competitive and talented that our music people are. And I'm just always sure that we'll persevere and we'll use the tools.

• 39:34Speaker 05

  We'll figure out cool new ways to do great new things with them. And we'll iterate on what we've done before and we'll come up with a new, new way of making music and, and expressing ourselves. So that's really where my optimism comes, less so from thinking that all the platforms are going to get in line and do exactly what we want. Cause we know that's not going to happen or less so that we're going to have the perfect legislation that's going to be drafted and passed and approved this year. And because I know that's probably not going to happen, but I believe in our people.

• 40:05Speaker 06

  As you talk to all these companies, which of them seem the most artist friendly? Which of them seem the most distant? How's the dynamic?

• 40:11Speaker 05

  When I'm in the room, they're all artist friendly. They're all very nice and they all love creators.

• 40:17Speaker 06

  I'm just thinking about OpenAI doing Sora and just like launching it in the world. And like we stole everything or I just keep picking on OpenAI.

• 40:26Speaker 06

  Doing Studio Ghibli, right? Or saying this voice from our voice synthesizer sounds suspicious to like Scarlett Johansson until there's a lawsuit. Like some of them seem much more poised to be aggressive and some of them seem a little calmer.

• 40:40Speaker 05

  Some of them are more, they're just not as concerned about it and they're not focused on it. A little more frivolous with how they're treating the artist community. But I don't, maybe. I'm misinterpreting it. It doesn't seem like they're doing it to be spiteful, to be harmful. They're all trying to figure this out at the same time. And I have heard some people say they just want to move fast and break things. You've heard that probably more than I have. And they're gonna ask for forgiveness rather than permission. And those are things that are scary from a creative community perspective. People that have written songs and hold copyrights and intellectual property, we never want to hear that. We'll ask for forgiveness later. We're gonna use what you've created and what you own and

• 41:25Speaker 05

  what you legally have possession of, and we're gonna use that for our own benefit. That's a dangerous precedent, and one that I don't think any one of us on the creative side would support. But you are seeing some of that. So that needs to be worked out.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  We need to take another short break. We'll be back in a minute.

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• 43:30Speaker 04

  We're back with Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. Talking about the collision of AI in the music industry.

• 43:38Speaker 06

  There's an interesting split here. There's legislation that you've brought up, the No Fakes Act, which protects voice, image, and likeness. There's the Train Act, which would give creators access to the records of what was trained on, so you can demand royalties. There's the CLEAR Act, which is just a transparency act. Just tell us what's in the models. I would love all those to exist. Like you said, I don't know if this year is the year for a Congress to act with alacrity on AI.

• 44:03Speaker 05

  I just got back from DC and it doesn't seem like this is the year. They're having so much infighting, but there is a lot of alignment around these, which surprised me. It's bipartisan, bicameral support for especially the no fakes. Everybody knows that's the right thing to do. And how can we get it done? Let's get the language right. Let's not try and make it perfect. Let's get something on the books right now and then we can refine it. And that's at least my thought.

• 44:26Speaker 06

  You would think Donald Trump, of all people, would understand that the use of his voice is a powerful thing that he should... But it doesn't seem like it matters, right? Like, there's... I have a... Like, my most nihilistic version of this is copyright law exists as a framework for big corporations to make deals. And for everyone else, it's just a free for all. We're just gonna take stuff and remix it. And Mark Cuban and Taylor Swift are doing crypto ads, and that's just the end of the... You know, like, there's no holding back. And maybe there will be some laws on whatever timeline there are laws. And in the meantime, you're gonna get the platforms deciding that because copyright law is the structure by which they make deals, they gotta do something. So YouTube has likeness detection now. That is just a private legal framework. They just made up some rules about likeness, and you can sign up for it.

• 45:11Speaker 06

  And just the way that Content ID works on YouTube, they're like, "We saw your face. You're selling shoes. Do you want us to take it down?" And they'll take it down. That's a lot of platforms inventing a bunch of frameworks. Do you think that's going to be effective? Do you think there's something to learn there as you push Congress or other governments to do stuff? Or does that feel like just another kind of chaos for artists to deal with?

• 45:31Speaker 05

  It feels like a first step and it feels like something that is headed in the right direction because those are things that are attempting to protect the artists and the ownership that they have. And I appreciate people trying to do that, but it does make it difficult for the artists. Having some federal framework, some federal legislation, or even an industry-wide framework that we could all abide by would be even better. But everybody's just trying to figure this stuff out. People are trying to run their businesses, artists are trying to run their businesses, streamers are trying to run their businesses. And there's a lot, it's a dynamic that is very difficult. And I don't know that we faced a time like this before. Everybody likes to say, "We've seen this before, we've seen this before." And to some degree, that's true.

• 46:15Speaker 05

  We've seen sampling, we've seen streaming, we've seen, as I said, drum machines and disruptive technologies in the creative process. But this one, for some reason, feels different. And maybe I'm showing my age when I say that because everybody says that about the issues that are in their generation. But the change to the human creative process and the ownership of that is in question, or at least being discussed right now. And I don't think it's been as acute as it is now or has the potential to be now in the history of where we are in creativity and music.

• 46:51Speaker 06

  I don't sit in your shoes. I don't have to play the roles you have to play. I can just be direct. I look at the state of, I don't know, the world economy and I think those guys shouldn't be as rich as they are and all of the artists should be much richer than they are.

• 47:03Speaker 05

  I totally agree. Let's go.

• 47:05Speaker 06

  Are you allowed to be that frustrated and express that as clearly as I think your fans, as your constituencies in the music community want you to say it?

• 47:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I like to think so. I agree with artists and creators and people who make music are special. They just are. And what they do for society, what we do for the world, what we do for individuals, for communities, for countries. And I'm a music person, so I just see it through that lens. But I think that the people who do that should be taken care of and should be compensated. And they should have the ability to control what they make. And they should have the ability to decide how it's being used and how they're compensated and how they're credited. I just strongly believe that. And in my career, I've worked with so many special people, you know? And I remember, I've sadly worked on the last record of a lot of very talented people.

• 47:58Speaker 05

  I've worked on Whitney Houston's last record, Michael Jackson's last record, Luther Vand. And I remember distinctly when they've passed and thinking to myself, we've lost something so important and so meaningful. And people have their challenges, they have struggles, issues. Everybody has something they can get upset at an artist about. But at the end of the day, when an artist makes a record and you feel that record and you're driving your car or you're dancing at a wedding or you're at a concert, there's nothing in the world like that.

• 48:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:26Speaker 05

  And those people and the people that allow that to happen, we have to watch out for them, regardless of some of their shortcomings or some of their faults because of what they put into the world. And I just think that's powerful.

• 48:39Speaker 06

  Are you allowed to bring this fire to your meeting with the AI companies? That's, that's really what I'm asking here. I, for my audience, I sense frustration.

• 48:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 06

  This is gonna go out on YouTube and I invite you to take a scroll through the inevitable YouTube comments we're gonna get, which basically come down to why isn't Harvey arresting Sam Altman, right? Like, that's the vibe I get on this show all the time.

• 48:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:58Speaker 06

  These guys are, they've stolen everything and the people who should be getting the value, the people who make us feel joy are getting nothing. That's how people felt about Spotify. That's increasingly how people feel about YouTube. Are you allowed to bring the fire to your meetings and in your advocacy or are you playing a more subtle game?

• 49:13Speaker 05

  I try and bring fire with me no matter where I go.

• 49:15Speaker 06

  All right.

• 49:16Speaker 05

  But also it is a relationship and it's a long-term play. This is not gonna happen instantly. And how you're interacting with people is going to affect the outcome. And I, and I do believe, as I said, they're trying to run a business just like I'm trying to run a business or protect the business. Finding a solution is not going to be me just bulldozing them. It's going to be how do we come together to find something that works for both of us? And I have to say, much like streaming, when streaming came out, people were up in arms about it. Streaming is horrible. We're not getting paid. But on the other side of that, you see how many more people are listening to the music. You see how many more people are finding new artists that they never knew before. How many people are being encouraged to go to concerts because they discovered the song that they love on a streaming platform? So there are trade offs.

• 50:01Speaker 05

  So if somebody goes and just blows up streaming right off the bat, we lose a lot of other opportunities that are unintended or you might not have thought of. So approaching the AI people is kind of the same thing. Yes, we have some issues, but yes, you're also bringing something that could potentially benefit all of us, music creators, society at large. And so how do you manage that is, I guess, the challenge.

• 50:22Speaker 06

  There are some bulldozers in the music industry. When streaming came out, Taylor Swift bulldozed her way into a rate structure that eventually most of the industry adopted. She put a big article, I think it was in Wall Street Journal, about not being on Spotify at that time. Universal music exists. That is maybe the biggest bulldozer of all.

• 50:42Speaker 05

  Sir Lucian.

• 50:43Speaker 06

  Sir Lucian Grange, one of the biggest bulldozers of all. He's suing and settling with Sunos and UDOs in very tactical ways. The fight is whether the songs in Suno can be exported as MP3 files to be shared freely or whether you have to listen to them on a platform which provides at least some gatekeeping. I don't know if that's effective. I don't know if that's an effective restriction. I can think of 50 ways to get around that as an old college music.

• 51:07Speaker 05

  At least 50.

• 51:08Speaker 06

  But like, this is the level that the bulldozers are saying, okay, we are going to restrict your platform. Do you think that that kind of power in the music industry can lead the charge on pushing back?

• 51:20Speaker 05

  Yes, it can. Will it be effective? We'll see. At some point.

• 51:26Speaker 05

  I'm sure they all realize this much more than I do because they're incredibly smart and powerful and thoughtful, but consumers want what consumers want. And friction between consumers and music or consumers and how they access their music, those are things that you can push against as much as you would like to. And it's probably not going to work because people want to listen to their music. So yes, I think strong leadership and lawsuits and trying to be protective is important. And it is hopefully going to make advancements in the right direction. But at the end of the day, as I said, people want their music. They want to listen to it and that's probably going to change based on a lot of things.

• 52:09Speaker 05

  The lawsuits, the bulldozers, but also fans of music.

• 52:14Speaker 06

  I want to ask one more question here and then I'm going to talk about the Grammys and Disney for one second to wrap it up. You've been in the studios, you've seen artists use these tools in all kinds of ways. I'm assuming you've used the tools in all kinds of ways. What's the most innovative sound?

• 52:26Speaker 05

  I've never used the tools.

• 52:27Speaker 06

  You've never used the tools?

• 52:28Speaker 05

  No, just kidding.

• 52:29Speaker 06

  I was going to say, that's the breaking news.

• 52:31Speaker 05

  No, no, no, I'm sorry.

• 52:33Speaker 06

  What's the most innovative sound? What's the most innovative technique that you've seen the tools enable? Because that's the thing that to me would would maybe make the sale, not I'm going to make soul covers at 50 cent, right? Like there's something about that that's just like kind of cheap, right? But we're going to enable a new sound, a new method of songwriting that enables a new kind of story to be told. Where have you seen the bleeding edge?

• 52:54Speaker 05

  What I've seen interesting is people using the platform to create songs and generate stems and stems are the multi-track split outs. So you have all the drums on one track, bass on track.

• 53:05Speaker 06

  So you say the platform, you mean like Souno?

• 53:07Speaker 05

  Yeah. And creating stems and then having live musicians iterate off of the stems. So they'll say, okay, here's a really cool groove of a song that we love, but now let's do a live drum, a live bass, live keyboard player, not using the stems from the platform. But having those inspire live musicians to build on top of that. So I think that's kind of cool because it's almost like you're having a writing partner in the room that has infinite ideas. And you can say, well, let me try it like this. And you hear something that inspires something in you as a musician or as a producer. To me, those are interesting uses. I like less people who just prompt and get a sound and just stick that in their

• 53:48Speaker 05

  song. Say, oh, I got something from the platform. I'm going to use it. I like more when they get that and they hear it and it triggers something and you go to the next level from what you've just heard. And I think that's, I think that's a cool use of it.

• 54:00Speaker 06

  Let me put that in a sort of broader arc of music. We've talked about drum machines a lot. I'm a Depeche Mode fan.

• 54:05Speaker 05

  Me too.

• 54:06Speaker 06

  They became a drum machine band because the drums are too loud in their apartment. So the drum machine enabled Depeche Mode and then synthesizers enabled all of like post punk, first wave. That's my music. Like New Order exists because of a huge technological set of achievements that then they use to make a style of music. Turntables and mixers. We got first wave hip hop. Then we got samplers. We got another wave of hip hop. Autotune. You got Akon. Whatever that is, right? Like I can point, yeah. One of the most underrated and correctly rated artists of all time. Like at the same time, T-Pain. All right. Like I can point to, here's a technological innovation that led to a sound, that led to a genre, that led to a movement. What do you think that looks like with AI? Is it going to be

• 54:51Speaker 06

  the same kind of thing? Or is it slop? Because the danger is slop.

• 54:54Speaker 05

  The danger is definitely slop. I don't think it's going to be one thing because AI is so all across the board and it's being used in so many different ways. The drum machine was a very specific example, whereas AI is, you can't define its individual use. Everybody uses it differently. Every genre uses it. Now I'm finding out from you that even country's using it. So I don't think it's the same thing where you're gonna say, oh, that's that AI sound. I don't, I don't see that happening.

• 55:21Speaker 06

  I think that to me, you know, I look at all this data, all these feelings people have, and the whole industry can't point to the thing that they're delivering. We're gonna ask for all the GPUs and all the power, water rights, and you can't buy a stick of RAM for a PC anymore. And you can't point to the one thing that you made that's worth it. You can point to everything. We're gonna change everything. And that everything is almost too diffuse. And I'm sort of wondering, like, when, sure, Timberland's gonna do an AI artist, but I already know what that artist is gonna sound like, and I already know how the audience is gonna react to that. There's not a sound, right? There's not a K-pop of AI that's gonna reorient the listener or the audience. That, do you, do you see anybody trying that? Trying, pushing on it?

• 56:04Speaker 05

  I don't know. I, I don't even know what that would look like. I don't know what that, the result of that is. I think that you're gonna see new, different uses of the technology, and people are gonna continue to push the boundaries. And you talk about Timberland or Diplo or how they're using it, that's, I mean, we're in 1.0 version of this, and people are just getting used to seeing it in their toolbox. And once people have access to it for a little while, much like you saw the evolution of sampling, and it used to just be, take the song and just sing over the whole thing. Now it's take a piece and chop it and then flip it and reverse it and then speed it up and pitch it down. So you're gonna see new uses of this tool. And that's when you'll start to understand what its real power is.

• 56:49Speaker 06

  Well, some of it's talking about the Grammys a little bit. That's obviously the thing that Recording Academy does, is the thing that funds everything else. We started by talking about your decision-making process. You made a big decision. You're gonna leave CBS, you're bringing it to Disney, it's gonna stream across platforms. You talked about the content explosion that we're, we're in for. Just walk me through that decision. Why make the change?

• 57:08Speaker 05

  We'd been at CBS for over 50 years. They've been great partners. They were going through some ownership changes, as you know. They were trying to figure out what their focus was gonna be. And we also knew As a Grammy organization, we had expansive ideas and thoughts where we thought we could go as a brand. We wanted to be more international, more global. We wanted to reach more music people. You're seeing in music, genres or borders and languages are breaking down. There's music from all different parts of the world, K-pop, Afro beats, music from the Middle East, India, other areas, Latin, of course. We knew we needed to continue to grow our organization and our reach. And we felt Disney and ABC would be a great partner for that.

• 57:52Speaker 05

  It also really aligns with what they're doing as they're expanding into new areas and new territories. And they're a company that, I mean, I don't know about you, I've admired that company and the leadership over the last dozen years or more, how they've changed and how they've evolved, how they've kept up with technology, how they've always at the heart of that, though, been true to the artists, been true to storytellers, and they've been really passionate about making great things. So there was a lot of alignment for me personally and then also for our organization with Disney that just made logical sense.

• 58:25Speaker 06

  Was this a bidding war? Were they the biggest check or were they the biggest check and the best vibes?

• 58:30Speaker 05

  There were multiple people involved in wanting to be in the media rights business with us, which I'm very appreciative and thankful for. And I think that is a testament to the work that our organization has done, our board, our members, our staff and leadership over the last six years to get the organization to where we are, which was making sure we were relevant, making sure we were respected, making sure we were honoring music as accurately as we could. And so because of those things and our international opportunity and the availability of music in other parts of the world and our agency that we have to celebrate it, we were a desired property. And again, I'm fortunate for that. It was not about the biggest check for us, though. It was about making sure that we could...

• 59:15Speaker 05

  Further our mission, perpetuate the right narrative out into the music community that we are here to serve music people, uplift music because of what we talked about earlier, the importance of it and what I think music means to the world and to society. So Disney was a great partner because of that alignment. Yes, there was a financial component because as you touched on, everything we do, our advocacy, our education, our music preservation, our legislation, all of our work around music cares, all that stuff is paid for by our media rights deal. So we have to get the right deal. And we are a not-for-profit. A lot of people don't know that. We're not doing this for profit. We get the money that comes in the door, we push it back out into our music community to help music people. If you think about the L.A. wildfires, we did $30 million of relief to music people who lost their houses or their instruments or needed medical care.

• 1:00:00Speaker 05

  So those are the things that drive our decision, my decision, when it comes to doing a new media rights deal.

• 1:00:06Speaker 06

  One of the things I think about with award shows in particular is they were very powerful in what you might call the monoculture era. Everyone has seen all the movies, everyone has listened to the radio, everyone has heard most of the songs. That is dwindling, right? Everyone's in a little filter bubble on whatever algorithmic platform, listening to whatever, whatever TikTok hit the labels have paid to make big today. That's making the award show a more diffuse product, right? You can, I can watch the Grammys and I haven't heard of half the artists. How do you solve that problem? Because the value of the award show needs to stay high to fund all the other stuff.

• 1:00:38Speaker 05

  Well, as we touched on earlier, I still believe in live programming and live events, and that is going to be a premium offering. People want to see things that are timely that you can't record and watch later because there's that social element of it. Did you see what happened on this stage? Or did you see who won this? So that's, to me, an advantage that we have that's similar to sports. When you watch a sporting event, you want to watch it in real time because you want to see who won and who played well or what were the stories. So I hope and I believe truly that that is an advantage for an award show if done right. As far as the diffusion and the different genres. If we can make the show compelling and we can continue to tell human stories, which I think we've done over the last few years and our production partner Fullwell

• 1:01:23Speaker 05

  and Ben Winston have been instrumental in this, you bring audiences to the show because they're compelled to watch the stories and the human interest elements. And we're looking to expand that with our partnership with Disney. I think that's an important component of it because it's not just about what song you love. It's about the process. It's about who are the people that are making those songs and then to see it displayed in a way that nobody else can do. And I think we do that at the Grammys.

• 1:01:49Speaker 06

  So we should expect more, I know you produced the Michael Jackson documentary, we should expect more music biopics with Disney, more short form artists, human interest stories with Disney?

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  I'd like to think so. I'd like to think that we are partnered with, I think, the best storytellers around and using that platform and their expertise and knowledge and research and appetite for more music content is something that we are excited about. And we want to tell more stories about music people because to me, they're timely and they're compelling and it's what we need more of right now. So our hope is that Grammy Studios will continue to evolve and grow, produce more content around things that we're doing, shows in other parts of the world, tell stories about music people in other parts of the world. And of course, our show is going to be the highlight and it's music's biggest night. And so that's this year, February, coming up, it's going to be exciting, our

• 1:02:43Speaker 05

  first show on Disney, ABC.

• 1:02:45Speaker 06

  A lot of the young audience lives on what you would call social video platforms. They're on TikTok, they're on Instagram reels. Are you going to try to address them there more or you want the industry to handle that?

• 1:02:53Speaker 05

  No, absolutely. We want to be where music fans are and where people who are excited to watch music want to consume it. That's one of the exciting parts about our partnership with Disney Plus and ABC. They are very open to making sure we're Using all the different avenues and outlets to make sure we're sharing our content, sharing our story, sharing music with people. And we've seen some of the, a little bit of a decline around linear from our show. We've gone and gone up and down. We creeped our way back up to a pretty good number. But what we've also seen and experienced is a massive explosion of consumption in other mediums on the digital side, on our website, on YouTube, on the platforms. So obviously, consumers are changing and how people are watching are changing.

• 1:03:37Speaker 05

  And our hope is that we can keep up with that, especially now in our new partnership.

• 1:03:40Speaker 06

  Is TikTok still a place where all new music gets broken?

• 1:03:43Speaker 05

  A lot of it, definitely. I won't say all, but it's a massive influencer and it's a huge platform for music people. And I see a lot of people spending a lot of time and energy trying to figure out that strategy. How do we use it? How do we leverage that platform to get attention and eyeballs? And you touched on it earlier. It's an attention economy. There's so many things coming out. I hear 75,000, you said 50,000 AI songs a day and then another 100,000 songs on Spotify that are coming out. So there's so much competition for attention. TikTok is something that has proven to bring a lot of eyeballs and ears to the table.

• 1:04:18Speaker 06

  All right, last question. It's the toughest one of all. And I'm gonna let you get out of here. Why didn't Sabrina Carpenter win any Grammys this year?

• 1:04:25Speaker 05

  Because our voters didn't vote for her this year. It's a tough one. I love Sabrina. She had a great record, but the answer to your question is very simple. It's always about the voters. And there's quite often music that is incredible, that is amazing and so exciting that doesn't win. And we have eight nominees and seven of them lose sadly. It's subjective, it's challenging, but the good thing that I'm proud to say is it comes down to the voters and who they vote for. Our process has evolved over the time that I've been here. We've removed some steps. There was committees that used to be involved. There was other things that would help determine the nominees and the winners.

• 1:05:08Speaker 05

  Now it's a straight vote. How they vote is how you see the results coming out on television. So as much as Sabrina deserved to win and many other artists deserved to win, the voters dictate who gets that trophy.

• 1:05:22Speaker 06

  All right. Well, I hope you keep that process as human as possible for as long as possible. It seems important.

• 1:05:26Speaker 05

  Very important. Thank you, man.

• 1:05:28Speaker 06

  Thank you so much for being on Undercutter. This is always a pleasure, man.

• 1:05:30Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:05:32Speaker 04

  I'd like to thank Harvey Mason Jr. For taking the time to speak with me and thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe over to your podcast. If you really like the show, hit us with that five star review. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It's edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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