Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr.

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Image: The Verge; Photo by Rebecca Sapp / Getty Images for the Recording Academy

Rebooting the member list, taking the show streaming — is it enough in the age of AI? Today, I’m talking with Harvey Mason Jr. He’s the CEO of the Recording Academy, which is the nonprofit organization that puts on the Grammy Awards — the most prestigious awards in music — and runs the MusiCares charity, which helps artists in need. Harvey is a fascinating guy — as a musician and producer, he’s worked on projects with Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Girls’ Generation, and more as well as produced the music in movies like Pitch Perfect and Straight Outta Compton.
Harvey’s had a lot of work to do since he started as CEO of the Recording Academy in January 2020 — his predecessor was ousted just five months into the role in a swirl of scandals, and the Grammys — along with the Emmys and Oscars — were facing a reckoning with massive race and gender inequality in the awards. On top of all that, the music industry came crashing to a halt during the covid-19 pandemic, as live concerts and awards shows stopped happening, making MusiCares more important than ever.
So Harvey’s been busy these past few years. Now, the world of music is having a moment, with some of the biggest tours ever and an entirely new crop of emerging major artists. The 2025 Grammy nominations were just announced, and you can see it in the list: newcomers like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter have been nominated for Album of the Year right alongside Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.

If you’re a regular Decoder listener, you know that I’m always saying to watch what’s happening to the music industry because it’s a preview into what will happen to every other creative industry five years from now. The Grammys and the Recording Academy are no exception.
For the past 50 years, CBS has paid a huge fee to the Recording Academy to broadcast the Grammys, and the Recording Academy takes that money and uses it to fund things like MusiCares and lobby for legislation that protects artists’ rights. This isn’t a secret — you’ll hear Harvey lay it all out bluntly. The Grammys are where the revenue comes from.
That all worked in an era where traditional TV networks had money to spend and commanded a huge amount of attention — but that era is over. Harvey recently decided to move the Grammys deal to Disney starting in 2027, which will not only bring the show to ABC but also potentially to Disney Plus and Hulu. Live TV is increasingly driven by sports and awards shows like the Grammys, so I wanted to know how Harvey was thinking about this deal, what the possibility of streaming distribution would mean for the show itself, and how much he thought the Grammys needed the prestige and brand power of a company like Disney as opposed to the wider distribution of something like YouTube.
We also talked about the Grammy Awards themselves — what the categories are, how the winners are chosen, and who those winners get to be. That’s been Harvey’s biggest project, actually: the Recording Academy just completely requalified its pool of voting members for the Grammys as part of a yearslong effort to bring in younger voters and more women and people of color.
At the same time, the internet means the very idea of music genres has been getting blurrier and blurrier for over a decade. I asked Harvey to define “pop music,” and you’ll hear him think through the answer. I also wanted to know how Harvey’s thinking about fandoms and stan culture in the context of awards that are supposed to be about recognizing art, not just popularity.
And of course, Harvey and I also talked about AI, which is poised to disrupt almost every creative industry and which has already caused major lawsuits in the music industry. You’ll hear Harvey explain that he’s not a reflexive AI hater and that he thinks there’s a place for some of those tools in music production — in fact, he made the major decision to allow music made with AI tools to be eligible for the Grammys. But like many other people we’ve talked to, you’ll hear him tout the irreplaceable, irrepressible benefits of human creativity — and you’ll also hear him admit he’s nervous and that sorting it out is all going to be complex and difficult.
I’ll be honest with you — this is one of my favorite Decoder conversations in a while. I love talking about the music industry, and Harvey was open to thinking through a lot of these issues out loud on the show.
Okay, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Harvey Mason Jr., you’re the CEO of the Recording Academy. Welcome to Decoder.
Thanks, Nilay. Good to be here.
I’m excited to talk to you. As you might know, I’m obsessed with the music industry. I think paying attention to the music industry is the best way to predict what happens to every other creative industry five years from now. You obviously have a deep insight into that. On top of that, we’re talking a week before Grammy nominations come out, so I’m always interested in how that works and how you’re thinking about that process. The Grammys are such an important part of the cultural calendar every year.
And we have to talk about AI. There’s just an infinite amount of AI. I feel like the readers might throw me off a ledge if every Decoder isn’t about AI. Or if I keep going, they might throw me off a ledge. We’ll find out.
One or the other.
Let’s start with the basics. You’ve been in this job as CEO since 2020. There was a big shakeup in the Recording Academy. There was the lockdown. The music industry hibernated for a minute. We all did a lot of Zoom recordings. Now we’re back into massive tours. There’s a new era of stars emerging. Let’s start with the very basics, though. Tell people about the Recording Academy and its participation in the music industry.
Well, it starts with our show, and most people know us from the Grammys show. We’ve been doing the Grammys show for 66 years. I’ve been doing them since, as you said, four years ago as the CEO. The Grammy show celebrates music, lifts creators, and showcases all the different genres of music. The Recording Academy produces the Grammys and generates revenue from the show. We use that revenue, paid by CBS for a licensing fee, to [support] all our programs throughout the year. So it’s advocacy, fighting for the rights of music people, and talking about AI. We’re doing a ton of stuff in that space: making sure human creators are protected and other copyright intellectual property protections that we’re working on. We spend millions and millions of dollars every year advocating for the rights of music people. So that’s the one area.
The other area is a philanthropic organization that’s within the Academy called MusiCares. MusiCares is the give-back organization for anybody who’s a musician. You don’t have to be a member. If you’re a professional working in the music industry and you need help — if you are sick, you’re facing a drug addiction, a mental health crisis, crashed your car, or someone broke in and stole your guitar — these are things that MusiCares takes care of. And again, millions and millions of dollars every year. During covid, we gave $50 million in aid to music people who needed help. Then we do a lot through our museum, like education and preservation of music, making sure the next generation of kids is exposed to music. And if I didn’t have an instrument in my hand or we didn’t know about all the different genres of music, I wouldn’t have had a career. So, [we’re] making sure we do a lot of work through that. And that’s what is funded and financed by our show and our performance. That’s kind of the structure of the Recording Academy.
That’s really interesting to me. You described some very important philanthropic work. I think of MusiCares as a stabilizing force in the music industry. There isn’t a great social services net in the United States. Touring musicians don’t have regular jobs, and that provides essential stability for those folks. There’s a lot there that I think is important.
You’re being very open that the revenue comes from the show and from a licensing deal with CBS to distribute the show. We’ll talk in a little bit about where that deal is going and how it’s changing, because the Academy just announced it’s leaving CBS in a couple years, but let’s stick with the present day for a minute.
If I look at that in the broadest possible way, CBS is paying for a television show, and that TV show is paying to provide essential stability to touring musical artists. That might be a little weird. Does it ever strike you that it’s not all perfectly aligned?
No, it actually strikes me as being incredibly aligned because the idea of the show is to benefit creators. Even just on its face, the show itself, we know the economic impact the show has on creators, songwriters, producers, and engineers. All the ancillary or tangentially connected people who work in our industry, they all get a lift from our show. The streaming goes up, the consumption goes up, and the ability to tour goes up. So that helps the creative community. And then all the revenue that we create, all of the revenue that we put into it comes from that show. The major drivers for revenue for the Academy are the show, other Grammy Week activities, ticket sales, and sponsorships, all of which really happen during Grammy Week. So, all that money goes back into serving the community.
For me, the only thing that’s a little bit misaligned is the lack of information that the creative community has about why we do the show and that we even do these other things. A lot of people just think, “Oh, the Grammys are just the show.” And I spend a lot of time and energy — and we’ve got to do a better job of this as an Academy — letting creatives, artists, and producers know the reason that this show is so important is because it creates a bunch of money. I hate to be so crass, but it’s cash that we can use and deploy it back into our music community. So the better the show is, the better the ratings are, the more money we can generate from that show, the more money that comes directly back into our industry.
That’s part of the reason I asked the question that way. I realize it was pretty blunt. But that idea that the show — which is a defining broadcast television production — is the thing that stabilizes the music industry, and the way that it stabilizes the music industry, I think, is a little opaque to most people.
It is.
It sounds like it’s opaque to some of your members.
It is.
But it also seems like a thing you can poke at and say, “Is this how it should be structured?” And so I’m curious: You’re new in the role; obviously, you’ve been through a lot of change. I want to ask you about the TV side of it, right? I imagine you have some perspective on the idea that broadcast television is a rich source of revenue since that is changing as well. But is this how it should be structured? If you could change that, would you want to diversify that revenue at all?
A thousand percent. That’s one of my big goals for my time here at the Academy: to make sure that we’re not so reliant on just TV. Having said that, we are exploring a lot of different opportunities and how to best utilize the brand while still supporting music people and doing things within our mission. We don’t want to just go sell coffee mugs or just do different random things. We want to make sure that it’s on brand, it’s on mission, and it stays the most coveted award because it’s our peers voting for our peers. So, we want to make sure we keep that in mind. And it’s got to be a part of whatever we do to expand it. I would love to talk about misalignment; I would love to find an additional way to generate a bunch of money and resources that we could use for our community. But right now, our deal with CBS is the thing that moves the needle the most for us and allows us to have the maximum impact within our community.
Yeah, let’s come back to that in a minute. Let’s just continue on how the organization is structured for one second. How many people are at the Recording Academy? What does the business look like?
On the staff side, roughly 300 people between our different affiliates. As I said, it’s the Academy, it’s the Latin Academy, the [Grammy] Museum, and MusiCares.
Those 300 people — they’re distributed equally. How many people work on MusiCares versus the show itself, for example?
It fluctuates, but the majority of the people work for the Recording Academy. Approximately 200 people at the Academy, and then some split between the Latin Academy, the [Grammy] Museum, and MusiCares.
How many people are spending all of their time just working on the Grammy Awards every year?
Zero. That’s a seasonal effort. That’s something that we do. It’s a six-month focus. We’re always thinking about the show, and we’re really directing a lot of our efforts towards the outcomes that will happen on the show — but the show production is very specific to a few months of the year. The rest of the year, the team’s working on awards, on membership, on advocacy, on all the things that I talked about throughout the Academy. And we have a great staff: a DEI department, People and Culture. There are a lot of different departments that are focused on making sure that the Academy can have that impact and that we are growing the right membership. And [if] you talk about the awards and our ability to monetize our intellectual property or our Grammys through a show, [then] we have to have the right awards. So you have to have the right awards department thinking about that.
You’ve got to have the right membership department because, without the right members, you’re not going to get the right results. And in order to stay relevant, we have to have relevant members. So we’ve just gone through a membership overhaul; one hundred percent of our members have been requalified. We have 66 percent of our members who are all new within the last five years. We’ve just added 3,000 new women voters. We’ve got almost 40 percent of people of color. Those are not the numbers that we had four years ago. So we’re all very proud as a staff and as our elected leadership about the work that’s been done to change our membership. Which then, of course, changes the awards, changes our show, and changes our ability to generate revenue.
It’s interesting. I interview so many tech CEOs on this show, and I ask them what their products are and how they’re structured to make those products. They give me answers that are broadly familiar. We have a design team, we have an engineering team, we’ve got a go-to-market team.
Your product is the awards, right? It seems very clear just talking to you for the first five minutes here: you’re very focused on the Grammy Awards as a product. And what you’re describing is that we need the right members to vote on those awards, and then we need the right team members to decide what those awards should be. So, in the end, when we put on a TV show, it’s the right list of awards, and we come to the outcomes that people want.
How much fiddling do you do with that year to year? Because I think the value of the Grammys is that it is an institution. So some things have to stay the same, and some things obviously have to change, as you’re describing. How much do you think about that balance?
I think about it constantly, to tell you the truth. And “fiddling” is a nicer way, or maybe a more playful way, of saying it, but it’s really the evolution of what we do, an iteration around everything at the Academy. And that has been a big area of focus for me and my management team over the last four years because we are 66 years old. It is an iconic institution, if I could say so. And it means a lot to a lot of people, including people in the music community, but also music fans. So we want to be respectful of what that is and what it has been. But for me, we cannot afford to be stagnant. Music moves so fast, and you and your viewers / listeners know technology. The way people are consuming music and art is evolving so rapidly that we have to evolve as an organization.
So I spend a lot of time thinking: How can we adjust? How can we pivot? How can we see around the corner? What’s happening next? So a lot of that work, I have to say, comes from our membership because the membership really submits the changes. They submit proposals. What are we going to honor in music this year? How are we going to title this new category? What’s the nomenclature behind this genre of music? And the reason it’s so important is that the members are the ones that know. They know better than I do, they know better than a lot of the staff because our members are music professionals. So they might hear something in the new genre that’s coming up and be like, “Oh, you guys aren’t catching on. We have to honor this music.” And that’s how we continue to perpetuate excellence in music so we can showcase different things. It’s constant… Did you call it “tweaking” or “fiddling”? It’s constant fiddling.
Tweaking is nicer than fiddling.
It’s constant fiddling. And that process happens a couple times a year through a process of submitting proposals, and then they go into the trustee room, we vote, our staff adopts them, and they take place next year on the show.
How do you manage the tension between a professional organization that creates the awards, professional members who vote on the awards, and then making the Grammys for maybe the most mainstream possible audience on CBS, which is maybe the most mainstream of the broadcast networks? And all anybody really wants to see is Taylor Swift or Beyoncé win every award. There’s a mismatch between fandom culture on the one side, particularly in music, and stan culture — to put a more precise name on it — and then a bunch of music professionals saying, “Actually, this John Batiste album is the best album of the year.” There’s a real balance there that seems hard to manage.
Balance is nice. It’s a collision sometimes. It can be contentious; it can be controversial. But for us, and I’ll say for me personally, what I love about it is there’s no other award like it because it’s not about popularity. It’s not about who got the most streams or who had the most likes. It’s truly about the people who are in the industry and who are working day in and day out around music, listening to the records or songs or albums, and then deciding which one they think is the best. And it’s subjective. We know that. It’s not a basketball game; it’s all up to the interpretation of the listener.
But what makes our show valuable as of now, and maybe this isn’t always going to be the case, but as of now the most valuable television show in regards to music is because it’s not just about popularity. It’s not predictable. It’s about the voters giving the award for the year to the artists or music that they love. And it also attracts a different type of participation or attention from the artist community because it’s a very desirable thing to have your peers tell you you’ve done something special in that year, which I think is meaningful. So there’s an extra gravitas or weight to the Grammys, which I think translates to the viewers.
How do you think about that in the context of the criticism that the Grammys often gets from the larger public or from listeners? I’ll give you one specific example just because it is right in front of us as we head into Grammy season.
Beyoncé just doesn’t win Album of the Year or Record of the Year. These are the awards people want her to win as one of the major artists in our space, one of the cultural icons of our time. She just does not win them. I don’t know what else to say. We’re heading into nomination season. I think this conversation is going to open up again. What do you think about that? That’s what a huge, loud set of consumers wants from you from this show.
I hear them loud and clear. I would love her to win Album of the Year. I would also love a bunch of other people to win Album of the Year. I think there’s great music. I think it’s also subjective. Beyoncé obviously has a ton of very loyal and supportive fans, for which I don’t blame them. Beyoncé’s won a ton of Grammy Awards, so we really respect her creativity and her artistry. There’s no question about that as a voting body, there are different things that happen throughout the year that the voters sometimes resonate with in certain categories and other categories it doesn’t resonate. So, it’s really hard to predict.
I am excited for this year because there’s been so many amazing records. There’s been great work by some amazing artists, so I’m very optimistic for this year. As far as who wins what, who gets snubbed, who’s happy, and who’s mad, I can’t predict that. But what I can predict is that the voters will do their very best to listen to the music to evaluate the music. The other thing I can say is we also have a very different voting body now than we had three years ago, five years ago, or 10 years ago.
That voting body, that’s the thing you turned over, that’s this year’s big project you announced? The change? You said earlier that you requalified one hundred percent of the members. That’s one way to change the outcome — to change the voters.
The only way.
Well, the other way is to change the awards themselves, which I’ll come to. I think we pursue that on two tracks. But “we’re going to change who’s voting” is one way to change them. Did you actively think, “Okay, we’re getting to some of the wrong answers in who wins these awards; we’ve got to change leadership”?
It didn’t come so much from the answers. Maybe, personally, it did. I’ll back that up. But what it really stemmed from was looking at the makeup of our voting body and then looking at the makeup of music creators and who’s making it versus who’s consuming it versus who’s voting on it. And we wanted to make sure our membership was representative of our music community. And when I got here, it just wasn’t. We didn’t have enough people of color. We didn’t have enough women. We didn’t have certain representation in certain genres, in the dance community, the rock community, or the country. So we needed to rebalance or tweak or, I can’t remember the word you used, which I liked so much… fiddle. We needed to fiddle with the membership.
We needed to fiddle with it and make sure that it was aligned with not just the world but, more importantly, and specifically, with music and the music community. We had to look at the genres. What genres are really popular? Do we have enough members in those genres to evaluate it accurately? What are the new genres coming up that we want to make sure that we’re able to interpret and vote for and get good outcomes? Then if that’s a new one, we have to make sure we have members to support that. Otherwise, having a new category with nobody who can understand the nuance or the fine points of that genre voting is a failed concept. And so we want to make sure that the voters align with music and how it’s being made and consumed.
You’re at the end of the process now. You’ve requalified a hundred percent of people. You’ve added new members. Do you think you’re there? Do you think you have room to grow, change, and evolve further? To fiddle some more?
We still have room to grow, no question. Where our goals were, we set those goals pretty aggressively. We met them a bit early, actually, but there will continue to be new stretch goals and new things that I want to accomplish with our membership. And our membership team is amazing. They’re so proactive. And we have great committees around our membership team and elected leadership who are really passionate about membership. And as we said, until I hear your ideas for now, that’s the way we think we can affect the change in the outcomes, affect the relevance of our awards, and continue to grow the Grammy brand on a global basis.
The other way that at least comes to mind for me is the awards themselves, and maybe you’ll disagree. There are the halo awards: record, song, album. Underneath that, there are just a bunch of categorizations, Best Rap Album versus Best Rock Album. That implies that those genres exist, and you can neatly sort albums into them. The Grammys only got rid of Best Urban Album recently. That is a category with a long and loaded history. Maybe we don’t need that one anymore. But what the internet has done to music broadly is really blur genres.
Yes, smashed it up.
Completely, endlessly blur genres in ways that are exciting, in ways that are frankly confusing. And maybe the only genre left is country, which is why everyone’s making a country album this year. Because you can just go there and say it’s different than what you were doing before. You could change those awards. You could just requalify all the genres, too, and say, “Here are some hard lines.” Do you ever think about that?
Well, I’d love to hear your thoughts more when you talk about hard lines. The goal for the genre awards is to try and find some guardrails in which to fit music, and that’s very hard. You’re talking about, again, art and then someone’s interpretation of art and how to couple those in the different buckets so the people can evaluate them comparatively. So, we don’t want to see hip-hop going against rock because they’re so dissimilar. Dissimilar audiences, I think, dissimilar people who are creating. But as music becomes more and more blurred together — or mashed up, I guess I’ll say — there will be some conversations around how we’re going to title the awards, how we’re going to include them in different fields, and who should be voting on them. Right now, we have different fields. So you have a rock field, and under that will be a bunch of different genres of rock. Then, you’ll have a hip-hop field and a classical field.
And the way our voting works is that we encourage our voters to vote in three fields. So you don’t want somebody who doesn’t know anything about country just going into that category because their favorite artist is over there, or vice versa. You don’t need someone voting in classical who only knows one classical artist. So, the way we try to do it is to have qualified voters vote for the music that they like. Now, to your point, as music changes and genre walls come down, we’ll be able to open that up a little bit more. But that is, again, something that will be determined by our professional music community, our members. They’ll say, “Hey, Harvey, you know what? Membership team at the Academy, you know what? We think rock and jazz sound like it’s coming together. Let’s put that in one category.” And when that happens, because our members are telling us these things, it will change the way we vote.
Can you just do me a favor and try to define pop music in 2024?
Pop music in 2024?
I feel like I could define hip-hop. I feel like I could take a run at defining rock. I don’t know that I could define pop music.
Pop music is a bit amorphous because it changes from year to year, and it has something to do with the term and the title itself: “pop” or “popular,” and it’s the genre that tends to have the choruses, the sing-along melodies, the right style of production and vocalists. It’s very difficult because there are a lot of records that get lumped into pop. And as a creator, I can create it, and I can show you on a piano, and I could sing it, but it is a hard definition to nail down. The voters tend to do a really good job of that and making sure that they’re voting for music they feel should be in that category. And the way our labels, artists, and independent labels submit, they submit their music where they want to be. And so if somebody feels like, “Hey, this is a pop record,” it’ll go into pop. And for the most part, that’s where it’s evaluated.
I just think there’s something so interesting happening with genres because of the rise of the internet, and we’re well into it now. I think Taylor Swift wrote a piece about the death of genre 10 years ago, I think, for the Wall Street Journal. There just seems to be chaos in the industry that maybe fans have figured out, but the industry itself is still struggling with it. Whether that’s Lil Nas X ages ago or Cowboy Carter and Beyoncé this year, it feels like we don’t quite want to draw these lines anymore, but we need them in order to have things like the Grammy Awards or have enough awards to give out instead of one award for song.
All music.
And is that something you’re actively talking about? Does that come up with your members or the staff of the Recording Academy?
It does.
Where do these arguments really come from? Where do these arguments land?
They land by saying, our members will tell us when it’s time. And the members, again, are professionals. They’re all people working in studios and on tours, as well as engineers, writers, producers, artists, and singers. They’re the professionals. And when they say, “You know what? We’re tired of genres, or we’re tired of separating people and putting them in boxes,” then we’ll evolve. I can promise you that because our organization has never moved faster or been more fluid. We’ve never listened closer to our members or our music community. So when that starts to happen, we will make sure that things adjust.
Do you ever think about just doing random micro-genres? Every year, there’s a micro-genre. I’ll just pick drill. Drill music, it was a moment. It’s now kind of everywhere. You can hear it, in fact, in all of hip-hop. So it has devolved into not being a micro-genre but just being a sound that’s going to come and go. Sounds come and go. But last year, you could have just been like, “We’re going to have a drill category, and here’s the best drill artist of the year, and then next year, maybe we won’t have that category, and we’ll have something else.” Is that something that comes up? Is that an option that you’ve thought about? Because it’s something I’ve heard proposed.
Yes. And what needs to happen is, again, the voters need to have expertise in the genre. So if we had enough voters who knew exactly what was going on in the drill genre of music, then they would pop up and say, “Guys, we’re missing a whole group of music here. We need to honor it.” We would create the category. We’d go up in the next show, and they would then vote. But without that movement, without sustainable momentum behind the genre that translates into members, we would be popping new genres into the show without the support and the underpinning that it needs to be relevant and accurate.
If we put a drill category in now and we didn’t have enough voters and we had the wrong outcomes because just some random people started voting, “Oh, I know this name, let me vote for them,” it would be disrespectful to the creators in that genre. It would also be, I think, detrimental to the brand of the Academy and the Grammys. So when the time is right for those new genres, I like to think that they’ll be there. We just added the best African Performance. You see the rise of Amapiano and all the different genres, including Afro Beats, and we had the voters; we had the support. They proposed the award. It’s now in.
Let me ask you the big Decoder question, and then I want to talk about that question in practice.
You obviously have a lot of decisions to make. “What awards are we going to give, and to whom?” are some of the biggest decisions there. What’s your framework for making those decisions?
The framework for making decisions around awards is very different from my personal framework around decisions that I’d like to implement at the Academy. As it relates to awards, it’s a very straightforward process. Our members introduce the awards or other changes and proposals. They’re discussed through an appropriate committee, whether it’s planning and governance or awards and nominations; it goes through the committee system, and they vote it up or down. It then goes to the board of trustees, and it gets voted up or down, and I don’t have a vote in those things. I try to make sure the conversations are going in the right direction, but that really comes down to our board and our chair. Once those things are put in place, then I have to decide how to implement them. And that’s a pretty straightforward process around awards. But maybe the broader question you’re asking is: how do I CEO? How do I make the decisions in my role?
And I spend a lot of time listening, to be honest. And I’m not sure what the answer is for some of the other people you’ve interviewed or other CEOs, but I don’t pretend to know more than I know. I’m a lifetime learner, not a knower. And so when it comes time for a decision, I tend to move relatively quickly. I don’t sit and stew. I think perfection can sometimes get in the way of making progress. So I’ll listen, I’ll assemble my team, I’ll get the information that I need to make an educated and strategic decision, and then I’ll weigh it. To this point, my instincts and my finger have been on the pulse of what our organization wants or needs, and our members seem to be resonating with the decisions that have been happening. But if my personal taste or feelings fall out of favor with that, then it would really change my decision-making process because a lot of what I do is gather the information and decide from here what I think is right.
It’s almost like making music, to tell you the truth. I was a songwriter and producer for years. If you’re making music for everybody else, and you’re trying to guess what’s next, and you’re trying to make people happy, you’re going to make the same music that everyone else is making. But if you’re making music that turns you on, that excites you, that you love as a creator, and then you come out, as long as your tastes are aligned with the consumers, you’ll win. So, I feel the same way in the way I like to run our organization: a lot of listening, a lot of collaborating, and then trying to make smart, swift, thoughtful decisions.
I feel like a lot of the other CEOs I talk to would be well-served if they spent some time trying to make some music as opposed to just trying to make AI. [Laughs]
Let me put that into practice. You made a really big decision very recently. This week, you announced that you’re going to leave CBS. You’re going to take the Grammys to Disney and stream across Disney Plus, Hulu, and ABC. You’ve said it already: CBS represents almost one hundred percent of the revenue of the organization. You’ve been on CBS for 50 years. That’s a big change. That’s a big decision — to go to a new partner, new platforms, and new distribution. Why make that decision, and how’d you make it?
Definitely to see change, a transformational turning point in our organization. It was a very difficult decision, to be honest, because CBS has been a great partner. They’ve done amazing work with us, I believe, for 54 shows. When I came into this role, I realized that we had four years until there would be a renegotiation, and I really had a vision and a plan for where I thought the Academy needed to go. And partially, that’s why they have me in this role: to come to figure out what that vision is and make sure we’re executing it, aligning with the board of trustees and our executive leadership on the executive committee.
We know what has to happen. The idea behind who is going to be our partner to help us get there was a big part of that decision-making process. We met with several people. Ultimately, [we] ended up going with a different partner because it really aligned with our future vision: where we wanted to go and how we wanted to continue to build and grow in the organization but, more importantly, how we could serve more people and execute in our mission in a broader, wider, deeper scale. So we’re really excited about the future.
You had to decide, though, right? You come onto the job, you’re renegotiating four years, the deal’s up, you have to stick with CBS, or you have to go find a new partner. After 50 years, it feels like maybe the default was to say to CBS, and the first decision was to say, “Actually, I’m going to open this up.” How did you come to that moment where you thought, “I’ve got to make sure I know what my options are?”
That was really the decision-making factor. I wanted to know what our options were and make sure that we were exploring all possibilities. I’m in this role temporarily, for however long I’m here, but I’m really a fiduciary and a steward of the brand. I think it’s an institution that needs to be protected. It’s a not-for-profit. We’re not doing this other than to serve music people. So the idea was: how can we reach the best deal? How can we find the partner that most aligns with the future vision of the organization? So, it was an opportunity to explore the market. I thought that only made sense, even with the 54-year history that we had with CBS, again, being great partners. I think anyone would say if you have the opportunity to see what else is there, you should take a look and try to find that right alignment going forward.
Was there a bidding war? Did Disney just show up and say we’re going to pay more than everybody else? Did you have other options?
I will say we had other options. Probably won’t go too much deeper than that, just out of respect for our partners on both sides. CBS has been amazing to work with, and I also really look forward to seeing what’s going to come next in our new partnership.
When I think about the value that CBS brought over that sweep of fifty-plus years, they are one of the three big broadcast networks in the United States. They have a Tiffany Network. They actually broadcast in slightly higher quality than some of the other networks, which I always appreciate about CBS. But they had a distribution monopoly. They were just a nationally broadcast TV network that came into everyone’s homes. They were on every cable system. That’s how TV used to work. That is broken, right? Cord cutting is all over the place. People aren’t even using over-the-air antennas anymore.
That’s just not how it works. And the big distribution is in streaming. CBS does have some streaming in the mix. There’s a whole complicated story to be told about Paramount and all that over there, but Disney’s a little more… It’s very complicated. [Laughs] Literally, the plot of Succession is embedded in me just mentioning Paramount. Disney obviously has Disney Plus; they’ve got Hulu. Was that what you were looking at, “This is better distribution to a younger audience, it’s more stable, this is the future of how people are going to watch TV?” It does sound like “I need to make a lucrative TV show” is the heart of everything your organization does.
Well, you’ve nailed it. We have to have the right TV partner, not only for the revenue but also for the future of the brand, the health of the organization, and for the good of the music community. What we do is try to lift music and music creators, and how we can do that on the widest possible scale is something that I’m always thinking about. However, as it relates to CBS and its streaming platform versus ABC or Disney, I just have to say that CBS has been great. We’re going to make two more shows with them. They had a lot of very, very positive aspects of why we’ve been with them and why we might have considered going forward, but we also had to look at the future of consumption. We have to look at the future of how people are going to absorb or take in our show.
Where does it need to be seen? How does it need to be seen? These are all considerations that I’ve been having since I took this role four years ago. So [we’ve] got a couple more great shows to go with CBS — [I’m] looking forward to February 2nd this year. Then, after the next show, we’ll start to think about what this new deal means. But up until then, you know, your listeners and your viewers know, consumption is changing, television is changing, digital, streaming, even social media, how that all plays into how people are consuming content. Those are all things — as you can imagine — that were at the top of our minds when we started thinking about how we were going to move forward over the next 10 years.
When I talk to the CEOs of streaming platforms or other kinds of video platforms, the idea that the big catalog isn’t as valuable as things that are live comes up over and over again. You can see it right now in the battles over how much to pay for sports rights. Ferocious battles. Because people will tune into sports, and they will make an appointment to watch your service to watch sports. Award shows are right up there in the mix, right? People will watch award shows, but award shows need something a little different than sports. They need some prestige; they need some institutional heft. And it feels like, I don’t know, putting the Grammys on YouTube is just not as fancy as being anywhere near ABC and Disney. Maybe even putting the Grammys on Netflix is not as fancy as being somewhere near Disney and ABC. Did that factor into your decision-making?
Yeah, it all did. The heft, as you called it, was important in the gravitas behind the award and where it’s consumed, and how people are going to watch it. There’s still something unique and special about network television to a lot of consumers. To other sets of consumers, they really couldn’t care less about that. So, there is a balance or fine line that I wanted to make sure we walked with any partner that we join forces with.
Let me push on that just a little bit because there’s a tension there. The biggest distribution you could have is YouTube. Everybody has it. Maybe you don’t even have a choice to have it anymore. It’s just there. YouTube is just there. Everybody has it. If you wanted the biggest reach for your award show, you would just put it on YouTube. But that maybe wouldn’t give you as much revenue, and it wouldn’t give you as much brand shine. What’s the word? Halo. Halo. It wouldn’t give you as much revenue, and it probably wouldn’t give you as much brand halo versus Disney, which is Disney. Is that an actual trade-off you made? “I could get more audience on YouTube, but I would get more brand Halo and perhaps revenue from Disney”?
They’re all trade-offs, to tell you the truth. And that’s the balance; it’s the juggle that we have to do. How do we reach the most consumers or viewers so that we can monetize the show? But also, how do we showcase and lift artists so the most people see them? It’s a finely navigated line between those two things, and there are a lot of other considerations as well: the history of the brand sheen, accessibility, and different territories around the world where there’s a presence or a focus for us. So, there were a lot of factors that went into the calculus of deciding where the right home was for us. Hopefully, we feel like we made a good choice, but I guess we’ll see in the next 10 years.
When you think about moving to more internet-native distribution, there’s just a bunch of other stuff you can do. You can make it more interactive; you could cut it up into different pieces. Is that stuff you’re thinking about to reinvent the concept of an award show in that way?
One thousand percent. We know consumers are changing the way they consume, and their habits are evolving at all times. So we’re always going to try to be on the cutting edge of that. But again, balancing that with making sure we’re showcasing different genres of music and it’s not just one genre. You’re not just seeing only a certain group of creators. We also want to make sure that we’re honoring the tradition and the history of the brand. So that along with trying to innovate, trying to make sure we’re meeting viewers where they are and matching their habits with what we’re creating or producing, is something, again… This stuff is not easy. None of it is straightforward. And if I were to have assumed the role or taken the reins of the organization and said, “We’re going to do the same thing. We’re just going to march straight ahead; we’re going to keep making the same show.” I think that would’ve been the easier route, for sure. But we’re not doing that.
We’re looking at everything: every part of our experience, every part of our show, every part of how we serve our members, how we produce the show. Maybe you’ve seen over the last few years how we seat our artists, how we seat the music community, how we celebrate them, how we lift them, the tone. We produce in a loving way. And I know that sounds crazy, but we produce in a way that brings people together and tries to have camaraderie or collaboration in our community. And I think that means something to the viewer. So whether that means a three-hour show, a three-and-a-half-hour show going forward, or shorter versions or clips, we’re going to be looking at all that and doing a lot of new things over the coming years.
Yeah, that was my other question. Broadcast television imposed a discipline on TV production, whether it’s “We’re going to have thirty-minute sitcoms instead of endless, you can look at your phone streaming shows,” or whether it’s, “Boy, this award show has gone on for a long time, and it’s time to wrap it up,” there’s a discipline that was imposed by the distribution. Streaming just doesn’t have that. You really could have 10 Grammy Award shows a year. You could have an all-day long Grammy Award show and show people highlights later. But the compactness and the discipline of this is the show, and it begins and ends, which lends some tension to it and some stakes to it. I know you’re saying that’s open, and you’re thinking about it, but that seems important to preserve.
Nilay, you are a smart guy. You’re asking me all the questions that I ask myself, and I’m going to come get you to work with me, man; you know how to think about this stuff. But it is really, really at the top of my mind, for me and for our team, as to how we continue to be relevant. Because if you do the same thing over and over again, it’s not cool. No one’s going to take it. No one’s going to be excited about it. So the hard part of it is, and I hate to be, again, super basic about it, but it’s revenue. Making sure we’re balancing, being forward-looking, thinking about what’s next, how people are consuming, and how we can continue to monetize the brand and the show.
Again, not because we want to make a profit; that’s not the motivation. The agenda is to generate more revenue so that we can push it back into the industry and back into the community. For us, it’s about the health and the uplifting of music. This stuff is important. Music is so dang important, especially right now, maybe more than ever with the way the country’s gone, and the world’s gone, with so many disparate ideas and opinions. But I’ve seen it, Nilay, when I travel and when I see other parts of the world listening to music or listening to artists. We might have a crazy disagreement, but when the music comes on, everybody’s dancing and clapping and singing, and it just opens up people’s minds and their eyes.
So, because of the power of music and because of my belief and the Academy’s belief in the power of music, we’re going to do everything we can to try and make sure that we’re supporting it, we’re lifting it up, we’re showcasing it, and giving it a chance to do what it does. And if that means shortening the show, we’ll do that. If that means lengthening the show, more artists, less artists, different genres, more voters, we’re going to continue doing that work to change and evolve every day so that we can keep doing what we need to do to lift music people.
Let’s talk about what’s going on with music and where the money comes from in this industry because that seems under a lot of pressure as well. It doesn’t seem like anyone knows the answer, which is why I like paying so much attention to the music industry. We went through the Napster revolution. We are at the tail end of what feels like… Not the tail end. We’re at what feels like a plateau in streaming. Everyone has moved to streaming, and we understand how the economics work. That seemed stable for a minute. Oops, here comes AI, and that might upend everything once again. There’s a lot of work in AI in music right now. There’s a lot of controversy. There are some pretty good diss tracks made with AI.
Last year, Reservoir Media’s Golnar Khosrowshahi came on Decoder, and she said, “AI is on a collision course with the music industry.” And she’s buying catalogs left and right. She’s doing it. And she says, “This is a collision course.” Last year, you said music with AI-generated elements would be Grammy-eligible. So this is an important check mark. Okay, we’re going to allow some of this in here. Where do you think we are right now? We’ve gone through BBL Drizzy, and we’ve gone through some AI-generated beats. There’s a handful of pieces of legislation that maybe we should talk about. But where do you think the state of play is right now?
The state of play is so uncertain. I’m concerned because AI, as it relates to human creativity, scares me to death. I know it has a lot of power and potential to enhance and amplify human creativity, but right now, we don’t have guardrails in place. We don’t have any systems or processes set up so that human creators can be protected. So, the state of play is that we’ve got to get to work as an industry. And I know a lot of the smartest people are investing in AI, which I totally understand because it is so powerful and has so much potential.
But for me as a musician, as someone who also represents 25,000 members and music people from around the world, I want to make sure that human creativity is protected, for all the reasons I just said: the importance of music and the ability for us to tell stories and change hearts and minds. I think the human component to that is really, really dang important. So a little nervous that we haven’t got it sorted out. But I’m also optimistic, to be honest, Nilay, because human creators are not like computers. We take the chaos and the uncertainty in life and the stuff that AI hates, and we make incredible art from it. We are able to dig down deep into some of our most creative spaces, pull out the next amazing thing, and make great art that I don’t think any computer is going to match.
As much as we’re nervous and worried about it, I don’t think you can tell me that AI can create Songs in the Key of Life, Nevermind, or Illmatic. I don’t see it happening. So, I want to make sure we’re able to use AI, and I’m not an AI hater. I think it’s got great potential. I’ve been using it for eight or nine years in different forms. I’ve always been an early adopter of new tech, so I’m with it. I get it. But we have to make sure human creativity is protected, and we have a chance to make sure we’re remunerated properly, we have proper approvals, and it’s credited properly. Those are the things that are really important to me.
So, I look at the industry right now. I brought up “BBL Drizzy.” I think that beat was made with Udio, which is one of the AI song-generation tools. Udio, and then its competitor, Suno, were sued by a bunch of record labels because they ingested a vast catalog of music in order to build those tools and train on [them]. That seems like a comet that’s going to hit the earth. That loss will get resolved one way or the other, and then we’ll all live inside of that framework. Why let the people using those tools, when no one knows how the money works, or even if they’re appropriate or legal, be eligible for Grammys now, before the industry has sorted out the morality or economics of those tools?
The same way that we let the music that has samples be eligible, or we let the music that has synthesizers, Auto-Tune, or Pro Tools be eligible. It’s a technology, an evolution that has allowed people to do more, create differently, think differently, and make sounds we’ve never heard before. So, for us to draw a line in the sand and say, “If you used artificial intelligence, you are ineligible,” would be, I think, short-sighted. And I think it would also cut down on a lot of the music that’s being created and submitted. Also, where would you draw the line? There’s AI in so much of the software we use now for analyzing and doing mixes and sound design, not even just the generative AI that’s making music. The finer point is that we’ll allow AI to be utilized, but we’re not going to honor AI in the sense that if AI is performing a song, it’s our rules that we will not give the performance an award.
If AI is writing the song, we will not give an award for the songwriting component. So, if, for example, you wrote a song, it was a beautiful composition, it had the best lyrics, best music, and best chord progressions, and you had AI sing it, you could submit it. It’s not going to win for singing. It could win for songwriting. Conversely, if you had AI just write a song as a great song, but some vocalist sang it or rapped on it, and they performed the heck out of it, I’m not going to penalize the human creativity that went into that. So, I’m not going to give it an award for the songwriting, but I will give it an award for the performance. And that’s the way our rules are currently. I’m sure it’s going to change. The stuff is moving so quickly, but for now, that’s how the Academy is moving.
You are a songwriter; I’m confident that some of your work is in some of these training databases. How do you feel about that?
I believe there needs to be an understanding of what these models are training on, and I’m not sure exactly to what level it will come down, whether there’s compensation payment or crediting. I do think something has to change, and I don’t believe that people’s personal copy written material should just be used or accessed by everyone to do anything they want. So, we have to come to a bottom-line understanding. There are fairly trained models out there, people who are licensing groups of music or catalogs to train AI, and I think that’s a good place to start, but there’s a lot to talk about. That’s probably a whole other show that we could dive a little deeper into.
Yeah, I’m just looking at your list of credits. You’ve got Destiny’s Child, you’ve got Britney Spears, it’s all in here. Do you think that that stuff should be compensated if Suno and Udio are using it to train their models?
It’s a complicated subject. So I think there’s some real talk that needs to happen around that. Should it be compensated on the training side? At least we need to know what it’s training on, how much of it’s being used. There’s a lot of nuance to that question.
By the way, for the listener, you should just go look at Harvey’s Wikipedia page because I named two out of like 500 brand name artists that you’ve worked with. It is an incredible list. I should have just been asking about that the whole time.
The way that you would solve this problem economically in the framework of the law that we have right now is to assign ownership to something like your voice, the way you sound, or your likeness. The Recording Academy was in support of a bill that passed in Tennessee called the Elvis Act, which is a great name that adds voices to likeness protections. I read some of the coverage of that bill and it says, “Hey, there’s no carve out in here for Elvis impersonators. We’re going to solve the AI problem, and we might have just made Elvis impersonators illegal in Tennessee.” How do you see that balance? That’s tough.
There’s no perfect solution or magic bullet to any of this stuff, especially the speed at which it’s moving. We are really proud of the legislation that’s been introduced and passed in a couple of different states, but now we’re pushing for federal legislation with the No Fakes No Frauds Act in the House and the Senate.
But that’s dangerous, to make Elvis impersonators federally illegal.
That’s not the intention.
I know, but how would you write that law to say: “A robot can’t sound like Elvis, but this guy can?”
Again, there’s a lot of nuances. There’s no perfect bill. None of these bills are exact. Everyone is trying to compensate and accommodate the needs of a lot of people who have concerns and fears. Of course, we don’t want to prevent someone from impersonating Elvis, but we do want to prevent people from impersonating artists or singers and using their voices without any form of payment, approval, or the right crediting. And these bills are starts. I’m sure they’ll be revised. I’m sure there’ll be new bills and new things enacted. But right now, we’ve got bipartisan, bicameral support that there needs to be some legislation that supports and protects human creativity and artistry. So, for us, it’s the first step.
But even those two things you said, “We don’t want to stop Elvis impersonators, but we don’t want people to use artist’s voices without compensation.” Yeah, that means the Elvis impersonators have to pay. Just that little basic thing. “Don’t use my voice for that impersonation.” Does it matter to you whether it’s AI, an Elvis impersonator, or a Britney Spears impersonator?
It does, but laws also protect certain usage of other people’s voices, even if it’s another human doing it. You can’t pretend to be an artist and then monetize that in certain ways. So, there are laws in the books that prevent that from happening.
As the money moves around in the music industry, we’ve tried to solve that problem in different ways. So streaming rates went down, and now we all argue about songwriting credits to make sure some of the pennies come back to the original artists because the streaming isn’t paying those artists. I’ll give you an example only because Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts tour movie just hit Netflix. So, I saw a bunch of coverage of this again. Taylor Swift came and took her credit on “Deja Vu.” Controversial. I’m already playing with fire now. The two fandoms are going to come for me. But that’s the thing that happened. It’s very controversial. And then Elvis Costello, who’s one of my favorite artists, came out and said, “Okay, I agree that Olivia’s song, ‘Brutal,’ sounds a lot like ‘Pump It Up.’”
And then his quote was, “This is fine by me. That’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand-new toy. That’s what I did. I did not find any reason to go after them legally for that, because I think it would be ludicrous. Other people clearly felt differently about songs on that record.”
So we’ve now created a scenario where it’s the artist’s choice whether they go after other artists for using things like chord progressions or loud bridges. How do you see that resolving in the world of AI? It’s already chaos without AI, and now we’re using AI tools when we’re saying the answer to AI is to create more ownership of things like voices, chord progressions, and sounds.
It’s all going to continue to be a mess until we get it sorted out. Because yes, it’s difficult.
That is one of the most candid answers to that question I’ve ever got.
I think that’s the best I can give you because, as you said, certain artists tend to claim ownership differently than others. Also, artists sometimes have publishers or record companies that own pieces of their catalog that tend to be more aggressive than some artists might naturally be. But as you start introducing AI, unless we can understand where it’s coming from, what it’s replicating or learning from, and trying to simulate, it’s going to be really dang hard to figure out where the money needs to go or how the money can flow. I’ll tell you one story. I met with the head of the Copyright Office. She was an amazing woman. She came to my studio, and we started pulling up some of the generative AI platforms, and I was showing her how they worked.
This was probably eight months ago. She hadn’t really been exposed to much of it. I typed in a few words, and we made a track. I said, “Is that copyrightable?” And she says, “No, it’s not. It has to have human interaction or human involvement.” I said, “Well, I typed in the prompt.” She’s like, “Oh, well, Harvey, that’s not enough.” So, I took the same track and I typed a response. I said, “Well, change the key, change the tempo, and change these three lyrics.” And I sent it back to the platform, and it sent back a new song. I said, “Now, is that copyrightable?” And she says, “No, it’s getting closer, but I don’t think it’s enough.”
I did three rounds of prompts, [the track] came back [as a] slightly different song. And she said, “Okay, I think that’s right. I think that’s human interaction.” So, none of this is figured out. The head of the Copyright Office, who I thought was amazing and incredible, and I love the fact that she was interested and cared enough to come to my studio… But the fact [is] we don’t have an understanding of how this moves forward and how we protect creators, whether that’s the songwriters you mentioned, or people that just had catalogs from 20 years ago. We’re not going to have good clean answers until we get those understandings.
But those understandings come from litigation, right? We’re going to have to go fight this out. Someone’s going to have to sue the copyright office, or someone else is going to have to sue. One artist is going to have to sue another. The labels are going to sue the platforms.
If we can advocate properly and loudly enough, even within the tech platforms, throughout the labels and publishers, journalists, and podcast hosts, and come to an understanding of how this needs to function, as confusing as that might be. We can start to manage some of it internally. The same thing happened when we started sampling other people’s records. We had a bunch of hit records that included other people’s samples — and that ran its course. We kind of figured out how it needed to be treated and handled. [It’s the] same thing with streaming. There are things that people are putting in music all over the internet and on streaming services, and we’ve gotten to a place where we’re slightly better, [but] there’s still work to do there. I believe we’ll come to some solutions around AI and how we can all equally or equitably participate in the revenue.
Can I actually just make the comparison to sampling and how that played out? Because you lived it very directly. I watched it as a young copyright lawyer, and it seemed like the thing that got us through was that this is a pretty closed ecosystem. There are only so many producers and labels, and the number of labels is just getting smaller. There are only so many clearing houses and artists that are going to try to clear a sample. There are only so many managers and lawyers. So all those people could talk, and you could say, “I need to clear the sample,” or in the case of some very famous songs, forget, and then someone could show up and get all the money later, which has happened more times than not. But it’s a closed ecosystem.
Very different from AI. You’re right.
AI is this massive, open ecosystem. At the top of it are Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai at Google, and Sam Altman, who just don’t seem to give a shit. If you’re some lawyer for some artist and you try to roll up on Sam Altman, he’s going to say, “Look, I stole Scarlett Johansson’s voice. What are you going to do to me?” Is that going to play out the same way, or is it going to be messier? Because it seems like no one has any leverage over these companies.
I’m sure it’ll be messier because it is a wider-reaching issue. But I do think there’s a way. Maybe I’m overly optimistic in rose-colored glasses, but I think people realize the importance of music, maybe broader, the importance of art, and AI has an impact across all the different disciplines of artistry. And if we can continue to emphasize its value and importance and point out that this has the potential to really be harmful to it, I have to believe, in my human heart, that anybody would want that to be addressed. They would want to come up with a solution that made sense, whether it’s the guys you mentioned or heads of other companies.
I just think there’s a way to do it. I know everybody’s trying to build their companies and create value for their investors and shareholders. There are a lot of levels to this, but at the base, it’s music, man. It is music. We can’t have a wild, wild west around copyright and ownership and intellectual property protections. Stuff needs to be done properly so that we can continue to tell these stories and have these emotions and the heart and soul behind these songs. Otherwise, what are we doing? We’re just going to have the computer make everything. Now, if you look at AI for other things that are-
Did you talk to Sam Altman? Because that might be his answer.
I’m hoping to. He has a favorite artist. I know he does. He has a band he grew up listening to his whole life in his bedroom while he was programming some computer. He loves somebody, or he read a book that mattered, or he saw a piece of art that moved him. Everybody has. Not everybody, but most people. I believe in human creativity. I believe in AI and the power that it has to enhance and amplify human creativity, and there’s a way that they can coexist. I believe.
A theme of this conversation for me is the tension you have between your members who are professional musicians and part of that community, and an audience of consumers and fans.
Whenever we write about AI, the parts of our audience that are professional creatives are furious. I’m pretty sure that we got more responses to my interview with the CEO of Adobe that basically added up to “You should have arrested him,” more than any other episode of Decoder we’ve ever done. Because people were just mad that there’s generative AI in Photoshop. What do your members say about this? Are they as upset? Are they as furious?
Our members are split. There are a lot of members who say, “AI is the devil; don’t let it in the house.” And they are fearful, rightfully so. And then there’s another group of our members that are really excited about the power and the potential of AI, and they’re all in. They’re creating by using it. They’re doing everything they can using AI. And neither side is wrong. Again, the beauty of music, art, or creativity [is that] everybody creates differently. So, my role is a difficult one. It’s to try and serve our membership and our music community fairly and in a way that allows for a bright future for our creators. Whether that’s using AI, limiting AI, or making sure there are guidelines around AI — it’s to be determined. But my focus, when I wake up, is to make sure our human creativity is healthy, it’s allowed to endure, and we can continue to make a living.
We have a whole group of people who make their money, their living, pay their rent, and take care of their kids by creating art. And we have another generation that’s coming up that wants to do the same thing because they know how we express ourselves. We know how music can sometimes heal and unite people, and sometimes people… I was on a plane the other day, and there was a woman sitting next to me, a couple of seats over, on a laptop, and she was crying. I thought she was typing a letter to somebody. She was programming in logic on her keyboard, crying. So this is therapy; this is expression. This is a human emotion. And so I want to make sure that we’re realizing, yes, AI is a part of that. How can it be integrated in a way that’s responsible and reasonable?
Yeah. Well, Harvey, I got to let you go, but I can’t let you go without asking one question I’ve been dying to ask you the whole time. Who’s a young artist on the come-up that people should be paying attention to? Because I know you have a full view of this industry.
I do. I have a view of some of the coolest and best new artists in music. One of my favorite parts of the job is getting to meet these creators. But I’m going to ruin the question because it would be irresponsible of me to tell you who the next person was or somebody that I love because there are just so many. And I don’t want it to seem as if it’s an Academy endorsement. But I will say this: I think there are more new creators making music, making great art than in the history of music because of the access, because of the technology, because of the young woman I saw on the plane programming on a laptop like this, because of the fact that you can put music out without gatekeepers, without barriers to entry. You know the amount of songs that are being created and released; it’s astronomic, and it’s prolific.
And so I will say, to your question, there are great new artists in hip-hop. I’ve now heard a new crop of incredible rock bands, which I think we’ve had a little bit of a shortage of. I’ve heard… Obviously that [there’s a] move into country and some great new artists. I love how you’re seeing genre-bending artists creating different types of music in those genres. Jazz. There’s a rebirth around jazz that I’m loving and I’m really excited about. So I mean, I don’t know. I can geek out all day on music and new music, but this is a topic that I love to talk about. Great music, great new artists, and how we’re going to celebrate them.
All right. I did my best. That was the hardest question I could think of, which is why I saved for the end. I’m going to have to find you; we’re going to have to talk about music some other time, just for an hour. Thank you so much for coming to Decoder.
Anytime. I love it.

Image: The Verge; Photo by Rebecca Sapp / Getty Images for the Recording Academy

Rebooting the member list, taking the show streaming — is it enough in the age of AI?

Today, I’m talking with Harvey Mason Jr. He’s the CEO of the Recording Academy, which is the nonprofit organization that puts on the Grammy Awards — the most prestigious awards in music — and runs the MusiCares charity, which helps artists in need. Harvey is a fascinating guy — as a musician and producer, he’s worked on projects with Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Girls’ Generation, and more as well as produced the music in movies like Pitch Perfect and Straight Outta Compton.

Harvey’s had a lot of work to do since he started as CEO of the Recording Academy in January 2020 — his predecessor was ousted just five months into the role in a swirl of scandals, and the Grammys — along with the Emmys and Oscars — were facing a reckoning with massive race and gender inequality in the awards. On top of all that, the music industry came crashing to a halt during the covid-19 pandemic, as live concerts and awards shows stopped happening, making MusiCares more important than ever.

So Harvey’s been busy these past few years. Now, the world of music is having a moment, with some of the biggest tours ever and an entirely new crop of emerging major artists. The 2025 Grammy nominations were just announced, and you can see it in the list: newcomers like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter have been nominated for Album of the Year right alongside Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.

If you’re a regular Decoder listener, you know that I’m always saying to watch what’s happening to the music industry because it’s a preview into what will happen to every other creative industry five years from now. The Grammys and the Recording Academy are no exception.

For the past 50 years, CBS has paid a huge fee to the Recording Academy to broadcast the Grammys, and the Recording Academy takes that money and uses it to fund things like MusiCares and lobby for legislation that protects artists’ rights. This isn’t a secret — you’ll hear Harvey lay it all out bluntly. The Grammys are where the revenue comes from.

That all worked in an era where traditional TV networks had money to spend and commanded a huge amount of attention — but that era is over. Harvey recently decided to move the Grammys deal to Disney starting in 2027, which will not only bring the show to ABC but also potentially to Disney Plus and Hulu. Live TV is increasingly driven by sports and awards shows like the Grammys, so I wanted to know how Harvey was thinking about this deal, what the possibility of streaming distribution would mean for the show itself, and how much he thought the Grammys needed the prestige and brand power of a company like Disney as opposed to the wider distribution of something like YouTube.

We also talked about the Grammy Awards themselves — what the categories are, how the winners are chosen, and who those winners get to be. That’s been Harvey’s biggest project, actually: the Recording Academy just completely requalified its pool of voting members for the Grammys as part of a yearslong effort to bring in younger voters and more women and people of color.

At the same time, the internet means the very idea of music genres has been getting blurrier and blurrier for over a decade. I asked Harvey to define “pop music,” and you’ll hear him think through the answer. I also wanted to know how Harvey’s thinking about fandoms and stan culture in the context of awards that are supposed to be about recognizing art, not just popularity.

And of course, Harvey and I also talked about AI, which is poised to disrupt almost every creative industry and which has already caused major lawsuits in the music industry. You’ll hear Harvey explain that he’s not a reflexive AI hater and that he thinks there’s a place for some of those tools in music production — in fact, he made the major decision to allow music made with AI tools to be eligible for the Grammys. But like many other people we’ve talked to, you’ll hear him tout the irreplaceable, irrepressible benefits of human creativity — and you’ll also hear him admit he’s nervous and that sorting it out is all going to be complex and difficult.

I’ll be honest with you — this is one of my favorite Decoder conversations in a while. I love talking about the music industry, and Harvey was open to thinking through a lot of these issues out loud on the show.

Okay, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Harvey Mason Jr., you’re the CEO of the Recording Academy. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks, Nilay. Good to be here.

I’m excited to talk to you. As you might know, I’m obsessed with the music industry. I think paying attention to the music industry is the best way to predict what happens to every other creative industry five years from now. You obviously have a deep insight into that. On top of that, we’re talking a week before Grammy nominations come out, so I’m always interested in how that works and how you’re thinking about that process. The Grammys are such an important part of the cultural calendar every year.

And we have to talk about AI. There’s just an infinite amount of AI. I feel like the readers might throw me off a ledge if every Decoder isn’t about AI. Or if I keep going, they might throw me off a ledge. We’ll find out.

One or the other.

Let’s start with the basics. You’ve been in this job as CEO since 2020. There was a big shakeup in the Recording Academy. There was the lockdown. The music industry hibernated for a minute. We all did a lot of Zoom recordings. Now we’re back into massive tours. There’s a new era of stars emerging. Let’s start with the very basics, though. Tell people about the Recording Academy and its participation in the music industry.

Well, it starts with our show, and most people know us from the Grammys show. We’ve been doing the Grammys show for 66 years. I’ve been doing them since, as you said, four years ago as the CEO. The Grammy show celebrates music, lifts creators, and showcases all the different genres of music. The Recording Academy produces the Grammys and generates revenue from the show. We use that revenue, paid by CBS for a licensing fee, to [support] all our programs throughout the year. So it’s advocacy, fighting for the rights of music people, and talking about AI. We’re doing a ton of stuff in that space: making sure human creators are protected and other copyright intellectual property protections that we’re working on. We spend millions and millions of dollars every year advocating for the rights of music people. So that’s the one area.

The other area is a philanthropic organization that’s within the Academy called MusiCares. MusiCares is the give-back organization for anybody who’s a musician. You don’t have to be a member. If you’re a professional working in the music industry and you need help — if you are sick, you’re facing a drug addiction, a mental health crisis, crashed your car, or someone broke in and stole your guitar — these are things that MusiCares takes care of. And again, millions and millions of dollars every year. During covid, we gave $50 million in aid to music people who needed help. Then we do a lot through our museum, like education and preservation of music, making sure the next generation of kids is exposed to music. And if I didn’t have an instrument in my hand or we didn’t know about all the different genres of music, I wouldn’t have had a career. So, [we’re] making sure we do a lot of work through that. And that’s what is funded and financed by our show and our performance. That’s kind of the structure of the Recording Academy.

That’s really interesting to me. You described some very important philanthropic work. I think of MusiCares as a stabilizing force in the music industry. There isn’t a great social services net in the United States. Touring musicians don’t have regular jobs, and that provides essential stability for those folks. There’s a lot there that I think is important.

You’re being very open that the revenue comes from the show and from a licensing deal with CBS to distribute the show. We’ll talk in a little bit about where that deal is going and how it’s changing, because the Academy just announced it’s leaving CBS in a couple years, but let’s stick with the present day for a minute.

If I look at that in the broadest possible way, CBS is paying for a television show, and that TV show is paying to provide essential stability to touring musical artists. That might be a little weird. Does it ever strike you that it’s not all perfectly aligned?

No, it actually strikes me as being incredibly aligned because the idea of the show is to benefit creators. Even just on its face, the show itself, we know the economic impact the show has on creators, songwriters, producers, and engineers. All the ancillary or tangentially connected people who work in our industry, they all get a lift from our show. The streaming goes up, the consumption goes up, and the ability to tour goes up. So that helps the creative community. And then all the revenue that we create, all of the revenue that we put into it comes from that show. The major drivers for revenue for the Academy are the show, other Grammy Week activities, ticket sales, and sponsorships, all of which really happen during Grammy Week. So, all that money goes back into serving the community.

For me, the only thing that’s a little bit misaligned is the lack of information that the creative community has about why we do the show and that we even do these other things. A lot of people just think, “Oh, the Grammys are just the show.” And I spend a lot of time and energy — and we’ve got to do a better job of this as an Academy — letting creatives, artists, and producers know the reason that this show is so important is because it creates a bunch of money. I hate to be so crass, but it’s cash that we can use and deploy it back into our music community. So the better the show is, the better the ratings are, the more money we can generate from that show, the more money that comes directly back into our industry.

That’s part of the reason I asked the question that way. I realize it was pretty blunt. But that idea that the show — which is a defining broadcast television production — is the thing that stabilizes the music industry, and the way that it stabilizes the music industry, I think, is a little opaque to most people.

It is.

It sounds like it’s opaque to some of your members.

It is.

But it also seems like a thing you can poke at and say, “Is this how it should be structured?” And so I’m curious: You’re new in the role; obviously, you’ve been through a lot of change. I want to ask you about the TV side of it, right? I imagine you have some perspective on the idea that broadcast television is a rich source of revenue since that is changing as well. But is this how it should be structured? If you could change that, would you want to diversify that revenue at all?

A thousand percent. That’s one of my big goals for my time here at the Academy: to make sure that we’re not so reliant on just TV. Having said that, we are exploring a lot of different opportunities and how to best utilize the brand while still supporting music people and doing things within our mission. We don’t want to just go sell coffee mugs or just do different random things. We want to make sure that it’s on brand, it’s on mission, and it stays the most coveted award because it’s our peers voting for our peers. So, we want to make sure we keep that in mind. And it’s got to be a part of whatever we do to expand it. I would love to talk about misalignment; I would love to find an additional way to generate a bunch of money and resources that we could use for our community. But right now, our deal with CBS is the thing that moves the needle the most for us and allows us to have the maximum impact within our community.

Yeah, let’s come back to that in a minute. Let’s just continue on how the organization is structured for one second. How many people are at the Recording Academy? What does the business look like?

On the staff side, roughly 300 people between our different affiliates. As I said, it’s the Academy, it’s the Latin Academy, the [Grammy] Museum, and MusiCares.

Those 300 people — they’re distributed equally. How many people work on MusiCares versus the show itself, for example?

It fluctuates, but the majority of the people work for the Recording Academy. Approximately 200 people at the Academy, and then some split between the Latin Academy, the [Grammy] Museum, and MusiCares.

How many people are spending all of their time just working on the Grammy Awards every year?

Zero. That’s a seasonal effort. That’s something that we do. It’s a six-month focus. We’re always thinking about the show, and we’re really directing a lot of our efforts towards the outcomes that will happen on the show — but the show production is very specific to a few months of the year. The rest of the year, the team’s working on awards, on membership, on advocacy, on all the things that I talked about throughout the Academy. And we have a great staff: a DEI department, People and Culture. There are a lot of different departments that are focused on making sure that the Academy can have that impact and that we are growing the right membership. And [if] you talk about the awards and our ability to monetize our intellectual property or our Grammys through a show, [then] we have to have the right awards. So you have to have the right awards department thinking about that.

You’ve got to have the right membership department because, without the right members, you’re not going to get the right results. And in order to stay relevant, we have to have relevant members. So we’ve just gone through a membership overhaul; one hundred percent of our members have been requalified. We have 66 percent of our members who are all new within the last five years. We’ve just added 3,000 new women voters. We’ve got almost 40 percent of people of color. Those are not the numbers that we had four years ago. So we’re all very proud as a staff and as our elected leadership about the work that’s been done to change our membership. Which then, of course, changes the awards, changes our show, and changes our ability to generate revenue.

It’s interesting. I interview so many tech CEOs on this show, and I ask them what their products are and how they’re structured to make those products. They give me answers that are broadly familiar. We have a design team, we have an engineering team, we’ve got a go-to-market team.

Your product is the awards, right? It seems very clear just talking to you for the first five minutes here: you’re very focused on the Grammy Awards as a product. And what you’re describing is that we need the right members to vote on those awards, and then we need the right team members to decide what those awards should be. So, in the end, when we put on a TV show, it’s the right list of awards, and we come to the outcomes that people want.

How much fiddling do you do with that year to year? Because I think the value of the Grammys is that it is an institution. So some things have to stay the same, and some things obviously have to change, as you’re describing. How much do you think about that balance?

I think about it constantly, to tell you the truth. And “fiddling” is a nicer way, or maybe a more playful way, of saying it, but it’s really the evolution of what we do, an iteration around everything at the Academy. And that has been a big area of focus for me and my management team over the last four years because we are 66 years old. It is an iconic institution, if I could say so. And it means a lot to a lot of people, including people in the music community, but also music fans. So we want to be respectful of what that is and what it has been. But for me, we cannot afford to be stagnant. Music moves so fast, and you and your viewers / listeners know technology. The way people are consuming music and art is evolving so rapidly that we have to evolve as an organization.

So I spend a lot of time thinking: How can we adjust? How can we pivot? How can we see around the corner? What’s happening next? So a lot of that work, I have to say, comes from our membership because the membership really submits the changes. They submit proposals. What are we going to honor in music this year? How are we going to title this new category? What’s the nomenclature behind this genre of music? And the reason it’s so important is that the members are the ones that know. They know better than I do, they know better than a lot of the staff because our members are music professionals. So they might hear something in the new genre that’s coming up and be like, “Oh, you guys aren’t catching on. We have to honor this music.” And that’s how we continue to perpetuate excellence in music so we can showcase different things. It’s constant… Did you call it “tweaking” or “fiddling”? It’s constant fiddling.

Tweaking is nicer than fiddling.

It’s constant fiddling. And that process happens a couple times a year through a process of submitting proposals, and then they go into the trustee room, we vote, our staff adopts them, and they take place next year on the show.

How do you manage the tension between a professional organization that creates the awards, professional members who vote on the awards, and then making the Grammys for maybe the most mainstream possible audience on CBS, which is maybe the most mainstream of the broadcast networks? And all anybody really wants to see is Taylor Swift or Beyoncé win every award. There’s a mismatch between fandom culture on the one side, particularly in music, and stan culture — to put a more precise name on it — and then a bunch of music professionals saying, “Actually, this John Batiste album is the best album of the year.” There’s a real balance there that seems hard to manage.

Balance is nice. It’s a collision sometimes. It can be contentious; it can be controversial. But for us, and I’ll say for me personally, what I love about it is there’s no other award like it because it’s not about popularity. It’s not about who got the most streams or who had the most likes. It’s truly about the people who are in the industry and who are working day in and day out around music, listening to the records or songs or albums, and then deciding which one they think is the best. And it’s subjective. We know that. It’s not a basketball game; it’s all up to the interpretation of the listener.

But what makes our show valuable as of now, and maybe this isn’t always going to be the case, but as of now the most valuable television show in regards to music is because it’s not just about popularity. It’s not predictable. It’s about the voters giving the award for the year to the artists or music that they love. And it also attracts a different type of participation or attention from the artist community because it’s a very desirable thing to have your peers tell you you’ve done something special in that year, which I think is meaningful. So there’s an extra gravitas or weight to the Grammys, which I think translates to the viewers.

How do you think about that in the context of the criticism that the Grammys often gets from the larger public or from listeners? I’ll give you one specific example just because it is right in front of us as we head into Grammy season.

Beyoncé just doesn’t win Album of the Year or Record of the Year. These are the awards people want her to win as one of the major artists in our space, one of the cultural icons of our time. She just does not win them. I don’t know what else to say. We’re heading into nomination season. I think this conversation is going to open up again. What do you think about that? That’s what a huge, loud set of consumers wants from you from this show.

I hear them loud and clear. I would love her to win Album of the Year. I would also love a bunch of other people to win Album of the Year. I think there’s great music. I think it’s also subjective. Beyoncé obviously has a ton of very loyal and supportive fans, for which I don’t blame them. Beyoncé’s won a ton of Grammy Awards, so we really respect her creativity and her artistry. There’s no question about that as a voting body, there are different things that happen throughout the year that the voters sometimes resonate with in certain categories and other categories it doesn’t resonate. So, it’s really hard to predict.

I am excited for this year because there’s been so many amazing records. There’s been great work by some amazing artists, so I’m very optimistic for this year. As far as who wins what, who gets snubbed, who’s happy, and who’s mad, I can’t predict that. But what I can predict is that the voters will do their very best to listen to the music to evaluate the music. The other thing I can say is we also have a very different voting body now than we had three years ago, five years ago, or 10 years ago.

That voting body, that’s the thing you turned over, that’s this year’s big project you announced? The change? You said earlier that you requalified one hundred percent of the members. That’s one way to change the outcome — to change the voters.

The only way.

Well, the other way is to change the awards themselves, which I’ll come to. I think we pursue that on two tracks. But “we’re going to change who’s voting” is one way to change them. Did you actively think, “Okay, we’re getting to some of the wrong answers in who wins these awards; we’ve got to change leadership”?

It didn’t come so much from the answers. Maybe, personally, it did. I’ll back that up. But what it really stemmed from was looking at the makeup of our voting body and then looking at the makeup of music creators and who’s making it versus who’s consuming it versus who’s voting on it. And we wanted to make sure our membership was representative of our music community. And when I got here, it just wasn’t. We didn’t have enough people of color. We didn’t have enough women. We didn’t have certain representation in certain genres, in the dance community, the rock community, or the country. So we needed to rebalance or tweak or, I can’t remember the word you used, which I liked so much… fiddle. We needed to fiddle with the membership.

We needed to fiddle with it and make sure that it was aligned with not just the world but, more importantly, and specifically, with music and the music community. We had to look at the genres. What genres are really popular? Do we have enough members in those genres to evaluate it accurately? What are the new genres coming up that we want to make sure that we’re able to interpret and vote for and get good outcomes? Then if that’s a new one, we have to make sure we have members to support that. Otherwise, having a new category with nobody who can understand the nuance or the fine points of that genre voting is a failed concept. And so we want to make sure that the voters align with music and how it’s being made and consumed.

You’re at the end of the process now. You’ve requalified a hundred percent of people. You’ve added new members. Do you think you’re there? Do you think you have room to grow, change, and evolve further? To fiddle some more?

We still have room to grow, no question. Where our goals were, we set those goals pretty aggressively. We met them a bit early, actually, but there will continue to be new stretch goals and new things that I want to accomplish with our membership. And our membership team is amazing. They’re so proactive. And we have great committees around our membership team and elected leadership who are really passionate about membership. And as we said, until I hear your ideas for now, that’s the way we think we can affect the change in the outcomes, affect the relevance of our awards, and continue to grow the Grammy brand on a global basis.

The other way that at least comes to mind for me is the awards themselves, and maybe you’ll disagree. There are the halo awards: record, song, album. Underneath that, there are just a bunch of categorizations, Best Rap Album versus Best Rock Album. That implies that those genres exist, and you can neatly sort albums into them. The Grammys only got rid of Best Urban Album recently. That is a category with a long and loaded history. Maybe we don’t need that one anymore. But what the internet has done to music broadly is really blur genres.

Yes, smashed it up.

Completely, endlessly blur genres in ways that are exciting, in ways that are frankly confusing. And maybe the only genre left is country, which is why everyone’s making a country album this year. Because you can just go there and say it’s different than what you were doing before. You could change those awards. You could just requalify all the genres, too, and say, “Here are some hard lines.” Do you ever think about that?

Well, I’d love to hear your thoughts more when you talk about hard lines. The goal for the genre awards is to try and find some guardrails in which to fit music, and that’s very hard. You’re talking about, again, art and then someone’s interpretation of art and how to couple those in the different buckets so the people can evaluate them comparatively. So, we don’t want to see hip-hop going against rock because they’re so dissimilar. Dissimilar audiences, I think, dissimilar people who are creating. But as music becomes more and more blurred together — or mashed up, I guess I’ll say — there will be some conversations around how we’re going to title the awards, how we’re going to include them in different fields, and who should be voting on them. Right now, we have different fields. So you have a rock field, and under that will be a bunch of different genres of rock. Then, you’ll have a hip-hop field and a classical field.

And the way our voting works is that we encourage our voters to vote in three fields. So you don’t want somebody who doesn’t know anything about country just going into that category because their favorite artist is over there, or vice versa. You don’t need someone voting in classical who only knows one classical artist. So, the way we try to do it is to have qualified voters vote for the music that they like. Now, to your point, as music changes and genre walls come down, we’ll be able to open that up a little bit more. But that is, again, something that will be determined by our professional music community, our members. They’ll say, “Hey, Harvey, you know what? Membership team at the Academy, you know what? We think rock and jazz sound like it’s coming together. Let’s put that in one category.” And when that happens, because our members are telling us these things, it will change the way we vote.

Can you just do me a favor and try to define pop music in 2024?

Pop music in 2024?

I feel like I could define hip-hop. I feel like I could take a run at defining rock. I don’t know that I could define pop music.

Pop music is a bit amorphous because it changes from year to year, and it has something to do with the term and the title itself: “pop” or “popular,” and it’s the genre that tends to have the choruses, the sing-along melodies, the right style of production and vocalists. It’s very difficult because there are a lot of records that get lumped into pop. And as a creator, I can create it, and I can show you on a piano, and I could sing it, but it is a hard definition to nail down. The voters tend to do a really good job of that and making sure that they’re voting for music they feel should be in that category. And the way our labels, artists, and independent labels submit, they submit their music where they want to be. And so if somebody feels like, “Hey, this is a pop record,” it’ll go into pop. And for the most part, that’s where it’s evaluated.

I just think there’s something so interesting happening with genres because of the rise of the internet, and we’re well into it now. I think Taylor Swift wrote a piece about the death of genre 10 years ago, I think, for the Wall Street Journal. There just seems to be chaos in the industry that maybe fans have figured out, but the industry itself is still struggling with it. Whether that’s Lil Nas X ages ago or Cowboy Carter and Beyoncé this year, it feels like we don’t quite want to draw these lines anymore, but we need them in order to have things like the Grammy Awards or have enough awards to give out instead of one award for song.

All music.

And is that something you’re actively talking about? Does that come up with your members or the staff of the Recording Academy?

It does.

Where do these arguments really come from? Where do these arguments land?

They land by saying, our members will tell us when it’s time. And the members, again, are professionals. They’re all people working in studios and on tours, as well as engineers, writers, producers, artists, and singers. They’re the professionals. And when they say, “You know what? We’re tired of genres, or we’re tired of separating people and putting them in boxes,” then we’ll evolve. I can promise you that because our organization has never moved faster or been more fluid. We’ve never listened closer to our members or our music community. So when that starts to happen, we will make sure that things adjust.

Do you ever think about just doing random micro-genres? Every year, there’s a micro-genre. I’ll just pick drill. Drill music, it was a moment. It’s now kind of everywhere. You can hear it, in fact, in all of hip-hop. So it has devolved into not being a micro-genre but just being a sound that’s going to come and go. Sounds come and go. But last year, you could have just been like, “We’re going to have a drill category, and here’s the best drill artist of the year, and then next year, maybe we won’t have that category, and we’ll have something else.” Is that something that comes up? Is that an option that you’ve thought about? Because it’s something I’ve heard proposed.

Yes. And what needs to happen is, again, the voters need to have expertise in the genre. So if we had enough voters who knew exactly what was going on in the drill genre of music, then they would pop up and say, “Guys, we’re missing a whole group of music here. We need to honor it.” We would create the category. We’d go up in the next show, and they would then vote. But without that movement, without sustainable momentum behind the genre that translates into members, we would be popping new genres into the show without the support and the underpinning that it needs to be relevant and accurate.

If we put a drill category in now and we didn’t have enough voters and we had the wrong outcomes because just some random people started voting, “Oh, I know this name, let me vote for them,” it would be disrespectful to the creators in that genre. It would also be, I think, detrimental to the brand of the Academy and the Grammys. So when the time is right for those new genres, I like to think that they’ll be there. We just added the best African Performance. You see the rise of Amapiano and all the different genres, including Afro Beats, and we had the voters; we had the support. They proposed the award. It’s now in.

Let me ask you the big Decoder question, and then I want to talk about that question in practice.

You obviously have a lot of decisions to make. “What awards are we going to give, and to whom?” are some of the biggest decisions there. What’s your framework for making those decisions?

The framework for making decisions around awards is very different from my personal framework around decisions that I’d like to implement at the Academy. As it relates to awards, it’s a very straightforward process. Our members introduce the awards or other changes and proposals. They’re discussed through an appropriate committee, whether it’s planning and governance or awards and nominations; it goes through the committee system, and they vote it up or down. It then goes to the board of trustees, and it gets voted up or down, and I don’t have a vote in those things. I try to make sure the conversations are going in the right direction, but that really comes down to our board and our chair. Once those things are put in place, then I have to decide how to implement them. And that’s a pretty straightforward process around awards. But maybe the broader question you’re asking is: how do I CEO? How do I make the decisions in my role?

And I spend a lot of time listening, to be honest. And I’m not sure what the answer is for some of the other people you’ve interviewed or other CEOs, but I don’t pretend to know more than I know. I’m a lifetime learner, not a knower. And so when it comes time for a decision, I tend to move relatively quickly. I don’t sit and stew. I think perfection can sometimes get in the way of making progress. So I’ll listen, I’ll assemble my team, I’ll get the information that I need to make an educated and strategic decision, and then I’ll weigh it. To this point, my instincts and my finger have been on the pulse of what our organization wants or needs, and our members seem to be resonating with the decisions that have been happening. But if my personal taste or feelings fall out of favor with that, then it would really change my decision-making process because a lot of what I do is gather the information and decide from here what I think is right.

It’s almost like making music, to tell you the truth. I was a songwriter and producer for years. If you’re making music for everybody else, and you’re trying to guess what’s next, and you’re trying to make people happy, you’re going to make the same music that everyone else is making. But if you’re making music that turns you on, that excites you, that you love as a creator, and then you come out, as long as your tastes are aligned with the consumers, you’ll win. So, I feel the same way in the way I like to run our organization: a lot of listening, a lot of collaborating, and then trying to make smart, swift, thoughtful decisions.

I feel like a lot of the other CEOs I talk to would be well-served if they spent some time trying to make some music as opposed to just trying to make AI. [Laughs]

Let me put that into practice. You made a really big decision very recently. This week, you announced that you’re going to leave CBS. You’re going to take the Grammys to Disney and stream across Disney Plus, Hulu, and ABC. You’ve said it already: CBS represents almost one hundred percent of the revenue of the organization. You’ve been on CBS for 50 years. That’s a big change. That’s a big decision — to go to a new partner, new platforms, and new distribution. Why make that decision, and how’d you make it?

Definitely to see change, a transformational turning point in our organization. It was a very difficult decision, to be honest, because CBS has been a great partner. They’ve done amazing work with us, I believe, for 54 shows. When I came into this role, I realized that we had four years until there would be a renegotiation, and I really had a vision and a plan for where I thought the Academy needed to go. And partially, that’s why they have me in this role: to come to figure out what that vision is and make sure we’re executing it, aligning with the board of trustees and our executive leadership on the executive committee.

We know what has to happen. The idea behind who is going to be our partner to help us get there was a big part of that decision-making process. We met with several people. Ultimately, [we] ended up going with a different partner because it really aligned with our future vision: where we wanted to go and how we wanted to continue to build and grow in the organization but, more importantly, how we could serve more people and execute in our mission in a broader, wider, deeper scale. So we’re really excited about the future.

You had to decide, though, right? You come onto the job, you’re renegotiating four years, the deal’s up, you have to stick with CBS, or you have to go find a new partner. After 50 years, it feels like maybe the default was to say to CBS, and the first decision was to say, “Actually, I’m going to open this up.” How did you come to that moment where you thought, “I’ve got to make sure I know what my options are?”

That was really the decision-making factor. I wanted to know what our options were and make sure that we were exploring all possibilities. I’m in this role temporarily, for however long I’m here, but I’m really a fiduciary and a steward of the brand. I think it’s an institution that needs to be protected. It’s a not-for-profit. We’re not doing this other than to serve music people. So the idea was: how can we reach the best deal? How can we find the partner that most aligns with the future vision of the organization? So, it was an opportunity to explore the market. I thought that only made sense, even with the 54-year history that we had with CBS, again, being great partners. I think anyone would say if you have the opportunity to see what else is there, you should take a look and try to find that right alignment going forward.

Was there a bidding war? Did Disney just show up and say we’re going to pay more than everybody else? Did you have other options?

I will say we had other options. Probably won’t go too much deeper than that, just out of respect for our partners on both sides. CBS has been amazing to work with, and I also really look forward to seeing what’s going to come next in our new partnership.

When I think about the value that CBS brought over that sweep of fifty-plus years, they are one of the three big broadcast networks in the United States. They have a Tiffany Network. They actually broadcast in slightly higher quality than some of the other networks, which I always appreciate about CBS. But they had a distribution monopoly. They were just a nationally broadcast TV network that came into everyone’s homes. They were on every cable system. That’s how TV used to work. That is broken, right? Cord cutting is all over the place. People aren’t even using over-the-air antennas anymore.

That’s just not how it works. And the big distribution is in streaming. CBS does have some streaming in the mix. There’s a whole complicated story to be told about Paramount and all that over there, but Disney’s a little more… It’s very complicated. [Laughs] Literally, the plot of Succession is embedded in me just mentioning Paramount. Disney obviously has Disney Plus; they’ve got Hulu. Was that what you were looking at, “This is better distribution to a younger audience, it’s more stable, this is the future of how people are going to watch TV?” It does sound like “I need to make a lucrative TV show” is the heart of everything your organization does.

Well, you’ve nailed it. We have to have the right TV partner, not only for the revenue but also for the future of the brand, the health of the organization, and for the good of the music community. What we do is try to lift music and music creators, and how we can do that on the widest possible scale is something that I’m always thinking about. However, as it relates to CBS and its streaming platform versus ABC or Disney, I just have to say that CBS has been great. We’re going to make two more shows with them. They had a lot of very, very positive aspects of why we’ve been with them and why we might have considered going forward, but we also had to look at the future of consumption. We have to look at the future of how people are going to absorb or take in our show.

Where does it need to be seen? How does it need to be seen? These are all considerations that I’ve been having since I took this role four years ago. So [we’ve] got a couple more great shows to go with CBS — [I’m] looking forward to February 2nd this year. Then, after the next show, we’ll start to think about what this new deal means. But up until then, you know, your listeners and your viewers know, consumption is changing, television is changing, digital, streaming, even social media, how that all plays into how people are consuming content. Those are all things — as you can imagine — that were at the top of our minds when we started thinking about how we were going to move forward over the next 10 years.

When I talk to the CEOs of streaming platforms or other kinds of video platforms, the idea that the big catalog isn’t as valuable as things that are live comes up over and over again. You can see it right now in the battles over how much to pay for sports rights. Ferocious battles. Because people will tune into sports, and they will make an appointment to watch your service to watch sports. Award shows are right up there in the mix, right? People will watch award shows, but award shows need something a little different than sports. They need some prestige; they need some institutional heft. And it feels like, I don’t know, putting the Grammys on YouTube is just not as fancy as being anywhere near ABC and Disney. Maybe even putting the Grammys on Netflix is not as fancy as being somewhere near Disney and ABC. Did that factor into your decision-making?

Yeah, it all did. The heft, as you called it, was important in the gravitas behind the award and where it’s consumed, and how people are going to watch it. There’s still something unique and special about network television to a lot of consumers. To other sets of consumers, they really couldn’t care less about that. So, there is a balance or fine line that I wanted to make sure we walked with any partner that we join forces with.

Let me push on that just a little bit because there’s a tension there. The biggest distribution you could have is YouTube. Everybody has it. Maybe you don’t even have a choice to have it anymore. It’s just there. YouTube is just there. Everybody has it. If you wanted the biggest reach for your award show, you would just put it on YouTube. But that maybe wouldn’t give you as much revenue, and it wouldn’t give you as much brand shine. What’s the word? Halo. Halo. It wouldn’t give you as much revenue, and it probably wouldn’t give you as much brand halo versus Disney, which is Disney. Is that an actual trade-off you made? “I could get more audience on YouTube, but I would get more brand Halo and perhaps revenue from Disney”?

They’re all trade-offs, to tell you the truth. And that’s the balance; it’s the juggle that we have to do. How do we reach the most consumers or viewers so that we can monetize the show? But also, how do we showcase and lift artists so the most people see them? It’s a finely navigated line between those two things, and there are a lot of other considerations as well: the history of the brand sheen, accessibility, and different territories around the world where there’s a presence or a focus for us. So, there were a lot of factors that went into the calculus of deciding where the right home was for us. Hopefully, we feel like we made a good choice, but I guess we’ll see in the next 10 years.

When you think about moving to more internet-native distribution, there’s just a bunch of other stuff you can do. You can make it more interactive; you could cut it up into different pieces. Is that stuff you’re thinking about to reinvent the concept of an award show in that way?

One thousand percent. We know consumers are changing the way they consume, and their habits are evolving at all times. So we’re always going to try to be on the cutting edge of that. But again, balancing that with making sure we’re showcasing different genres of music and it’s not just one genre. You’re not just seeing only a certain group of creators. We also want to make sure that we’re honoring the tradition and the history of the brand. So that along with trying to innovate, trying to make sure we’re meeting viewers where they are and matching their habits with what we’re creating or producing, is something, again… This stuff is not easy. None of it is straightforward. And if I were to have assumed the role or taken the reins of the organization and said, “We’re going to do the same thing. We’re just going to march straight ahead; we’re going to keep making the same show.” I think that would’ve been the easier route, for sure. But we’re not doing that.

We’re looking at everything: every part of our experience, every part of our show, every part of how we serve our members, how we produce the show. Maybe you’ve seen over the last few years how we seat our artists, how we seat the music community, how we celebrate them, how we lift them, the tone. We produce in a loving way. And I know that sounds crazy, but we produce in a way that brings people together and tries to have camaraderie or collaboration in our community. And I think that means something to the viewer. So whether that means a three-hour show, a three-and-a-half-hour show going forward, or shorter versions or clips, we’re going to be looking at all that and doing a lot of new things over the coming years.

Yeah, that was my other question. Broadcast television imposed a discipline on TV production, whether it’s “We’re going to have thirty-minute sitcoms instead of endless, you can look at your phone streaming shows,” or whether it’s, “Boy, this award show has gone on for a long time, and it’s time to wrap it up,” there’s a discipline that was imposed by the distribution. Streaming just doesn’t have that. You really could have 10 Grammy Award shows a year. You could have an all-day long Grammy Award show and show people highlights later. But the compactness and the discipline of this is the show, and it begins and ends, which lends some tension to it and some stakes to it. I know you’re saying that’s open, and you’re thinking about it, but that seems important to preserve.

Nilay, you are a smart guy. You’re asking me all the questions that I ask myself, and I’m going to come get you to work with me, man; you know how to think about this stuff. But it is really, really at the top of my mind, for me and for our team, as to how we continue to be relevant. Because if you do the same thing over and over again, it’s not cool. No one’s going to take it. No one’s going to be excited about it. So the hard part of it is, and I hate to be, again, super basic about it, but it’s revenue. Making sure we’re balancing, being forward-looking, thinking about what’s next, how people are consuming, and how we can continue to monetize the brand and the show.

Again, not because we want to make a profit; that’s not the motivation. The agenda is to generate more revenue so that we can push it back into the industry and back into the community. For us, it’s about the health and the uplifting of music. This stuff is important. Music is so dang important, especially right now, maybe more than ever with the way the country’s gone, and the world’s gone, with so many disparate ideas and opinions. But I’ve seen it, Nilay, when I travel and when I see other parts of the world listening to music or listening to artists. We might have a crazy disagreement, but when the music comes on, everybody’s dancing and clapping and singing, and it just opens up people’s minds and their eyes.

So, because of the power of music and because of my belief and the Academy’s belief in the power of music, we’re going to do everything we can to try and make sure that we’re supporting it, we’re lifting it up, we’re showcasing it, and giving it a chance to do what it does. And if that means shortening the show, we’ll do that. If that means lengthening the show, more artists, less artists, different genres, more voters, we’re going to continue doing that work to change and evolve every day so that we can keep doing what we need to do to lift music people.

Let’s talk about what’s going on with music and where the money comes from in this industry because that seems under a lot of pressure as well. It doesn’t seem like anyone knows the answer, which is why I like paying so much attention to the music industry. We went through the Napster revolution. We are at the tail end of what feels like… Not the tail end. We’re at what feels like a plateau in streaming. Everyone has moved to streaming, and we understand how the economics work. That seemed stable for a minute. Oops, here comes AI, and that might upend everything once again. There’s a lot of work in AI in music right now. There’s a lot of controversy. There are some pretty good diss tracks made with AI.

Last year, Reservoir Media’s Golnar Khosrowshahi came on Decoder, and she said, “AI is on a collision course with the music industry.” And she’s buying catalogs left and right. She’s doing it. And she says, “This is a collision course.” Last year, you said music with AI-generated elements would be Grammy-eligible. So this is an important check mark. Okay, we’re going to allow some of this in here. Where do you think we are right now? We’ve gone through BBL Drizzy, and we’ve gone through some AI-generated beats. There’s a handful of pieces of legislation that maybe we should talk about. But where do you think the state of play is right now?

The state of play is so uncertain. I’m concerned because AI, as it relates to human creativity, scares me to death. I know it has a lot of power and potential to enhance and amplify human creativity, but right now, we don’t have guardrails in place. We don’t have any systems or processes set up so that human creators can be protected. So, the state of play is that we’ve got to get to work as an industry. And I know a lot of the smartest people are investing in AI, which I totally understand because it is so powerful and has so much potential.

But for me as a musician, as someone who also represents 25,000 members and music people from around the world, I want to make sure that human creativity is protected, for all the reasons I just said: the importance of music and the ability for us to tell stories and change hearts and minds. I think the human component to that is really, really dang important. So a little nervous that we haven’t got it sorted out. But I’m also optimistic, to be honest, Nilay, because human creators are not like computers. We take the chaos and the uncertainty in life and the stuff that AI hates, and we make incredible art from it. We are able to dig down deep into some of our most creative spaces, pull out the next amazing thing, and make great art that I don’t think any computer is going to match.

As much as we’re nervous and worried about it, I don’t think you can tell me that AI can create Songs in the Key of Life, Nevermind, or Illmatic. I don’t see it happening. So, I want to make sure we’re able to use AI, and I’m not an AI hater. I think it’s got great potential. I’ve been using it for eight or nine years in different forms. I’ve always been an early adopter of new tech, so I’m with it. I get it. But we have to make sure human creativity is protected, and we have a chance to make sure we’re remunerated properly, we have proper approvals, and it’s credited properly. Those are the things that are really important to me.

So, I look at the industry right now. I brought up “BBL Drizzy.” I think that beat was made with Udio, which is one of the AI song-generation tools. Udio, and then its competitor, Suno, were sued by a bunch of record labels because they ingested a vast catalog of music in order to build those tools and train on [them]. That seems like a comet that’s going to hit the earth. That loss will get resolved one way or the other, and then we’ll all live inside of that framework. Why let the people using those tools, when no one knows how the money works, or even if they’re appropriate or legal, be eligible for Grammys now, before the industry has sorted out the morality or economics of those tools?

The same way that we let the music that has samples be eligible, or we let the music that has synthesizers, Auto-Tune, or Pro Tools be eligible. It’s a technology, an evolution that has allowed people to do more, create differently, think differently, and make sounds we’ve never heard before. So, for us to draw a line in the sand and say, “If you used artificial intelligence, you are ineligible,” would be, I think, short-sighted. And I think it would also cut down on a lot of the music that’s being created and submitted. Also, where would you draw the line? There’s AI in so much of the software we use now for analyzing and doing mixes and sound design, not even just the generative AI that’s making music. The finer point is that we’ll allow AI to be utilized, but we’re not going to honor AI in the sense that if AI is performing a song, it’s our rules that we will not give the performance an award.

If AI is writing the song, we will not give an award for the songwriting component. So, if, for example, you wrote a song, it was a beautiful composition, it had the best lyrics, best music, and best chord progressions, and you had AI sing it, you could submit it. It’s not going to win for singing. It could win for songwriting. Conversely, if you had AI just write a song as a great song, but some vocalist sang it or rapped on it, and they performed the heck out of it, I’m not going to penalize the human creativity that went into that. So, I’m not going to give it an award for the songwriting, but I will give it an award for the performance. And that’s the way our rules are currently. I’m sure it’s going to change. The stuff is moving so quickly, but for now, that’s how the Academy is moving.

You are a songwriter; I’m confident that some of your work is in some of these training databases. How do you feel about that?

I believe there needs to be an understanding of what these models are training on, and I’m not sure exactly to what level it will come down, whether there’s compensation payment or crediting. I do think something has to change, and I don’t believe that people’s personal copy written material should just be used or accessed by everyone to do anything they want. So, we have to come to a bottom-line understanding. There are fairly trained models out there, people who are licensing groups of music or catalogs to train AI, and I think that’s a good place to start, but there’s a lot to talk about. That’s probably a whole other show that we could dive a little deeper into.

Yeah, I’m just looking at your list of credits. You’ve got Destiny’s Child, you’ve got Britney Spears, it’s all in here. Do you think that that stuff should be compensated if Suno and Udio are using it to train their models?

It’s a complicated subject. So I think there’s some real talk that needs to happen around that. Should it be compensated on the training side? At least we need to know what it’s training on, how much of it’s being used. There’s a lot of nuance to that question.

By the way, for the listener, you should just go look at Harvey’s Wikipedia page because I named two out of like 500 brand name artists that you’ve worked with. It is an incredible list. I should have just been asking about that the whole time.

The way that you would solve this problem economically in the framework of the law that we have right now is to assign ownership to something like your voice, the way you sound, or your likeness. The Recording Academy was in support of a bill that passed in Tennessee called the Elvis Act, which is a great name that adds voices to likeness protections. I read some of the coverage of that bill and it says, “Hey, there’s no carve out in here for Elvis impersonators. We’re going to solve the AI problem, and we might have just made Elvis impersonators illegal in Tennessee.” How do you see that balance? That’s tough.

There’s no perfect solution or magic bullet to any of this stuff, especially the speed at which it’s moving. We are really proud of the legislation that’s been introduced and passed in a couple of different states, but now we’re pushing for federal legislation with the No Fakes No Frauds Act in the House and the Senate.

But that’s dangerous, to make Elvis impersonators federally illegal.

That’s not the intention.

I know, but how would you write that law to say: “A robot can’t sound like Elvis, but this guy can?”

Again, there’s a lot of nuances. There’s no perfect bill. None of these bills are exact. Everyone is trying to compensate and accommodate the needs of a lot of people who have concerns and fears. Of course, we don’t want to prevent someone from impersonating Elvis, but we do want to prevent people from impersonating artists or singers and using their voices without any form of payment, approval, or the right crediting. And these bills are starts. I’m sure they’ll be revised. I’m sure there’ll be new bills and new things enacted. But right now, we’ve got bipartisan, bicameral support that there needs to be some legislation that supports and protects human creativity and artistry. So, for us, it’s the first step.

But even those two things you said, “We don’t want to stop Elvis impersonators, but we don’t want people to use artist’s voices without compensation.” Yeah, that means the Elvis impersonators have to pay. Just that little basic thing. “Don’t use my voice for that impersonation.” Does it matter to you whether it’s AI, an Elvis impersonator, or a Britney Spears impersonator?

It does, but laws also protect certain usage of other people’s voices, even if it’s another human doing it. You can’t pretend to be an artist and then monetize that in certain ways. So, there are laws in the books that prevent that from happening.

As the money moves around in the music industry, we’ve tried to solve that problem in different ways. So streaming rates went down, and now we all argue about songwriting credits to make sure some of the pennies come back to the original artists because the streaming isn’t paying those artists. I’ll give you an example only because Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts tour movie just hit Netflix. So, I saw a bunch of coverage of this again. Taylor Swift came and took her credit on “Deja Vu.” Controversial. I’m already playing with fire now. The two fandoms are going to come for me. But that’s the thing that happened. It’s very controversial. And then Elvis Costello, who’s one of my favorite artists, came out and said, “Okay, I agree that Olivia’s song, ‘Brutal,’ sounds a lot like ‘Pump It Up.’”

And then his quote was, “This is fine by me. That’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand-new toy. That’s what I did. I did not find any reason to go after them legally for that, because I think it would be ludicrous. Other people clearly felt differently about songs on that record.”

So we’ve now created a scenario where it’s the artist’s choice whether they go after other artists for using things like chord progressions or loud bridges. How do you see that resolving in the world of AI? It’s already chaos without AI, and now we’re using AI tools when we’re saying the answer to AI is to create more ownership of things like voices, chord progressions, and sounds.

It’s all going to continue to be a mess until we get it sorted out. Because yes, it’s difficult.

That is one of the most candid answers to that question I’ve ever got.

I think that’s the best I can give you because, as you said, certain artists tend to claim ownership differently than others. Also, artists sometimes have publishers or record companies that own pieces of their catalog that tend to be more aggressive than some artists might naturally be. But as you start introducing AI, unless we can understand where it’s coming from, what it’s replicating or learning from, and trying to simulate, it’s going to be really dang hard to figure out where the money needs to go or how the money can flow. I’ll tell you one story. I met with the head of the Copyright Office. She was an amazing woman. She came to my studio, and we started pulling up some of the generative AI platforms, and I was showing her how they worked.

This was probably eight months ago. She hadn’t really been exposed to much of it. I typed in a few words, and we made a track. I said, “Is that copyrightable?” And she says, “No, it’s not. It has to have human interaction or human involvement.” I said, “Well, I typed in the prompt.” She’s like, “Oh, well, Harvey, that’s not enough.” So, I took the same track and I typed a response. I said, “Well, change the key, change the tempo, and change these three lyrics.” And I sent it back to the platform, and it sent back a new song. I said, “Now, is that copyrightable?” And she says, “No, it’s getting closer, but I don’t think it’s enough.”

I did three rounds of prompts, [the track] came back [as a] slightly different song. And she said, “Okay, I think that’s right. I think that’s human interaction.” So, none of this is figured out. The head of the Copyright Office, who I thought was amazing and incredible, and I love the fact that she was interested and cared enough to come to my studio… But the fact [is] we don’t have an understanding of how this moves forward and how we protect creators, whether that’s the songwriters you mentioned, or people that just had catalogs from 20 years ago. We’re not going to have good clean answers until we get those understandings.

But those understandings come from litigation, right? We’re going to have to go fight this out. Someone’s going to have to sue the copyright office, or someone else is going to have to sue. One artist is going to have to sue another. The labels are going to sue the platforms.

If we can advocate properly and loudly enough, even within the tech platforms, throughout the labels and publishers, journalists, and podcast hosts, and come to an understanding of how this needs to function, as confusing as that might be. We can start to manage some of it internally. The same thing happened when we started sampling other people’s records. We had a bunch of hit records that included other people’s samples — and that ran its course. We kind of figured out how it needed to be treated and handled. [It’s the] same thing with streaming. There are things that people are putting in music all over the internet and on streaming services, and we’ve gotten to a place where we’re slightly better, [but] there’s still work to do there. I believe we’ll come to some solutions around AI and how we can all equally or equitably participate in the revenue.

Can I actually just make the comparison to sampling and how that played out? Because you lived it very directly. I watched it as a young copyright lawyer, and it seemed like the thing that got us through was that this is a pretty closed ecosystem. There are only so many producers and labels, and the number of labels is just getting smaller. There are only so many clearing houses and artists that are going to try to clear a sample. There are only so many managers and lawyers. So all those people could talk, and you could say, “I need to clear the sample,” or in the case of some very famous songs, forget, and then someone could show up and get all the money later, which has happened more times than not. But it’s a closed ecosystem.

Very different from AI. You’re right.

AI is this massive, open ecosystem. At the top of it are Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai at Google, and Sam Altman, who just don’t seem to give a shit. If you’re some lawyer for some artist and you try to roll up on Sam Altman, he’s going to say, “Look, I stole Scarlett Johansson’s voice. What are you going to do to me?” Is that going to play out the same way, or is it going to be messier? Because it seems like no one has any leverage over these companies.

I’m sure it’ll be messier because it is a wider-reaching issue. But I do think there’s a way. Maybe I’m overly optimistic in rose-colored glasses, but I think people realize the importance of music, maybe broader, the importance of art, and AI has an impact across all the different disciplines of artistry. And if we can continue to emphasize its value and importance and point out that this has the potential to really be harmful to it, I have to believe, in my human heart, that anybody would want that to be addressed. They would want to come up with a solution that made sense, whether it’s the guys you mentioned or heads of other companies.

I just think there’s a way to do it. I know everybody’s trying to build their companies and create value for their investors and shareholders. There are a lot of levels to this, but at the base, it’s music, man. It is music. We can’t have a wild, wild west around copyright and ownership and intellectual property protections. Stuff needs to be done properly so that we can continue to tell these stories and have these emotions and the heart and soul behind these songs. Otherwise, what are we doing? We’re just going to have the computer make everything. Now, if you look at AI for other things that are-

Did you talk to Sam Altman? Because that might be his answer.

I’m hoping to. He has a favorite artist. I know he does. He has a band he grew up listening to his whole life in his bedroom while he was programming some computer. He loves somebody, or he read a book that mattered, or he saw a piece of art that moved him. Everybody has. Not everybody, but most people. I believe in human creativity. I believe in AI and the power that it has to enhance and amplify human creativity, and there’s a way that they can coexist. I believe.

A theme of this conversation for me is the tension you have between your members who are professional musicians and part of that community, and an audience of consumers and fans.

Whenever we write about AI, the parts of our audience that are professional creatives are furious. I’m pretty sure that we got more responses to my interview with the CEO of Adobe that basically added up to “You should have arrested him,” more than any other episode of Decoder we’ve ever done. Because people were just mad that there’s generative AI in Photoshop. What do your members say about this? Are they as upset? Are they as furious?

Our members are split. There are a lot of members who say, “AI is the devil; don’t let it in the house.” And they are fearful, rightfully so. And then there’s another group of our members that are really excited about the power and the potential of AI, and they’re all in. They’re creating by using it. They’re doing everything they can using AI. And neither side is wrong. Again, the beauty of music, art, or creativity [is that] everybody creates differently. So, my role is a difficult one. It’s to try and serve our membership and our music community fairly and in a way that allows for a bright future for our creators. Whether that’s using AI, limiting AI, or making sure there are guidelines around AI — it’s to be determined. But my focus, when I wake up, is to make sure our human creativity is healthy, it’s allowed to endure, and we can continue to make a living.

We have a whole group of people who make their money, their living, pay their rent, and take care of their kids by creating art. And we have another generation that’s coming up that wants to do the same thing because they know how we express ourselves. We know how music can sometimes heal and unite people, and sometimes people… I was on a plane the other day, and there was a woman sitting next to me, a couple of seats over, on a laptop, and she was crying. I thought she was typing a letter to somebody. She was programming in logic on her keyboard, crying. So this is therapy; this is expression. This is a human emotion. And so I want to make sure that we’re realizing, yes, AI is a part of that. How can it be integrated in a way that’s responsible and reasonable?

Yeah. Well, Harvey, I got to let you go, but I can’t let you go without asking one question I’ve been dying to ask you the whole time. Who’s a young artist on the come-up that people should be paying attention to? Because I know you have a full view of this industry.

I do. I have a view of some of the coolest and best new artists in music. One of my favorite parts of the job is getting to meet these creators. But I’m going to ruin the question because it would be irresponsible of me to tell you who the next person was or somebody that I love because there are just so many. And I don’t want it to seem as if it’s an Academy endorsement. But I will say this: I think there are more new creators making music, making great art than in the history of music because of the access, because of the technology, because of the young woman I saw on the plane programming on a laptop like this, because of the fact that you can put music out without gatekeepers, without barriers to entry. You know the amount of songs that are being created and released; it’s astronomic, and it’s prolific.

And so I will say, to your question, there are great new artists in hip-hop. I’ve now heard a new crop of incredible rock bands, which I think we’ve had a little bit of a shortage of. I’ve heard… Obviously that [there’s a] move into country and some great new artists. I love how you’re seeing genre-bending artists creating different types of music in those genres. Jazz. There’s a rebirth around jazz that I’m loving and I’m really excited about. So I mean, I don’t know. I can geek out all day on music and new music, but this is a topic that I love to talk about. Great music, great new artists, and how we’re going to celebrate them.

All right. I did my best. That was the hardest question I could think of, which is why I saved for the end. I’m going to have to find you; we’re going to have to talk about music some other time, just for an hour. Thank you so much for coming to Decoder.

Anytime. I love it.

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