Dyrektor generalny Grammy Harvey Mason Jr. o różnorodności, streamingu i sztucznej inteligencji

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 simply 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 quite a few work to do since he started as CEO of the Recording Academy in January 2020 — his predecessor was ousted just 5 months into the function in a swirl of scandals, and the Grammys — along with the Emmys and Oscars — were facing a reckoning with massive race and sex inequality in the awards. On top of all that, the music manufacture came crashing to a halt during the covid-19 pandemic, as live concerts and awards shows stopped happening, making MusiCares more crucial than ever.

So Harvey’s been busy these past fewer years. Now, the planet of music is having a moment, with any of the biggest tours always and an entirely fresh 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 manufacture due to the fact that it’s a preview into what will happen to all another creative manufacture 5 years from now. The Grammys and the Recording Academy are no exception.

For the past 50 years, CBS has paid a immense 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 government that protects artists’ rights. This isn’t a secret — you’ll hear Harvey lay it all out bluntly. The Grammys are where the gross comes from.

That all worked in an era where conventional tv networks had money to spend and commanded a immense amount of attention — but that era is over. Harvey late decided to move the Grammys deal to Disney starting in 2027, which will not only bring the show to ABC but besides possibly 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 reasoning about this deal, what the anticipation 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 besides 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 net means the very thought of music genres has been getting blurrier and blurrier for over a decade. I asked Harvey to specify “pop music,” and you’ll hear him think through the answer. I besides wanted to know how Harvey’s reasoning about fandoms and stan culture in the context of awards that are expected to be about recognizing art, not just popularity.

And of course, Harvey and I besides talked about AI, which is poised to disrupt almost all creative manufacture 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 any of those tools in music production — in fact, he made the major decision to let music made with AI tools to be eligible for the Grammys. But like many another people we’ve talked to, you’ll hear him tout the irreplaceable, irrepressible benefits of human creativity — and you’ll besides hear him admit he’s tense and that sorting it out is all going to be complex and difficult.

I’ll be honest with you — this is 1 of my favourite Decoder conversations in a while. I love talking about the music industry, and Harvey was open to reasoning through quite a few these issues out loud on the show.

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

This transcript has been lightly edited for dimension 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 manufacture is the best way to foretell what happens to all another creative manufacture 5 years from now. You evidently have a deep insight into that. On top of that, we’re talking a week before Grammy nominations come out, so I’m always curious in how that works and how you’re reasoning about that process. The Grammys are specified an crucial part of the cultural calendar all year.

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

Let’s start with the basics. You’ve been in this occupation as CEO since 2020. There was a large shakeup in the Recording Academy. There was the lockdown. The music manufacture hibernated for a minute. We all did quite a few Zoom recordings. Now we’re back into massive tours. There’s a fresh 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, 4 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 gross from the show. We usage 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 certain human creators are protected and another copyright intellectual property protections that we’re working on. We spend millions and millions of dollars all year advocating for the rights of music people. So that’s the 1 area.

The another area is simply 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 should be a member. If you’re a professional working in the music manufacture and you request aid — if you are sick, you’re facing a drug addiction, a intellectual wellness crisis, crashed your car, or individual broke in and stole your guitar — these are things that MusiCares takes care of. And again, millions and millions of dollars all 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 certain 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 certain we do quite a few 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 truly interesting to me. You described any very crucial philanthropic work. I think of MusiCares as a stabilizing force in the music industry. There isn’t a large social services net in the United States. Touring musicians don’t have regular jobs, and that provides essential stableness for those folks. There’s a lot there that I think is important.

You’re being very open that the gross comes from the show and from a licensing deal with CBS to distribute the show. We’ll talk in a small bit about where that deal is going and how it’s changing, due to the fact that 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 tv show, and that tv show is paying to supply essential stableness to touring musical artists. That might be a small weird. Does it always strike you that it’s not all perfectly aligned?

No, it actually strikes me as being incredibly aligned due to the fact that the thought of the show is to benefit creators. Even just on its face, the show itself, we know the economical 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 gross that we create, all of the gross that we put into it comes from that show. The major drivers for gross for the Academy are the show, another Grammy Week activities, ticket sales, and sponsorships, all of which truly happen during Grammy Week. So, all that money goes back into serving the community.

For me, the only thing that’s a small bit misaligned is the deficiency of information that the creative community has about why we do the show and that we even do these another things. quite a few people just think, “Oh, the Grammys are just the show.” And I spend quite a few time and energy — and we’ve got to do a better occupation of this as an Academy — letting creatives, artists, and producers know the reason that this show is so crucial is due to the fact that it creates a bunch of money. I hatred to be so crass, but it’s cash that we can usage and deploy it back into our music community. So the better the show is, the better the ratings are, the more money we can make from that show, the more money that comes straight back into our industry.

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

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

But it besides seems like a thing you can poke at and say, “Is this how it should be structured?” And so I’m curious: You’re fresh in the role; obviously, you’ve been through quite a few change. I want to ask you about the tv side of it, right? I imagine you have any position on the thought that broadcast tv is simply a rich origin of gross 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 gross at all?

A 1000 percent. That’s 1 of my large goals for my time here at the Academy: to make certain that we’re not so reliant on just TV. Having said that, we are exploring quite a few different opportunities and how to best utilize the brand while inactive supporting music people and doing things within our mission. We don’t want to just go sale coffee mugs or just do different random things. We want to make certain that it’s on brand, it’s on mission, and it stays the most coveted award due to the fact that it’s our peers voting for our peers. So, we want to make certain we keep that in mind. And it’s got to be a part of whatever we do to grow it. I would love to talk about misalignment; I would love to find an additional way to make a bunch of money and resources that we could usage 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 proceed on how the organization is structured for 1 second. How many people are at the Recording Academy? What does the business look like?

On the staff side, about 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. about 200 people at the Academy, and then any divided between the Latin Academy, the [Grammy] Museum, and MusiCares.

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

Zero. That’s a seasonal effort. That’s something that we do. It’s a six-month focus. We’re always reasoning about the show, and we’re truly directing quite a few our efforts towards the outcomes that will happen on the show — but the show production is very circumstantial to a fewer months of the year. The remainder 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 large staff: a DEI department, People and Culture. There are quite a few different departments that are focused on making certain that the Academy can have that impact and that we are increasing 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 gotta have the right awards. So you gotta have the right awards department reasoning 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 gotta have applicable members. So we’ve just gone through a membership overhaul; 1 100 percent of our members have been requalified. We have 66 percent of our members who are all fresh within the last 5 years. We’ve just added 3,000 fresh women voters. We’ve got almost 40 percent of people of color. Those are not the numbers that we had 4 years ago. So we’re all very arrogant 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 make 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 plan 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 5 minutes here: you’re very focused on the Grammy Awards as a product. And what you’re describing is that we request the right members to vote on those awards, and then we request the right squad members to decide what those awards should be. So, in the end, erstwhile 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? due to the fact that I think the value of the Grammys is that it is an institution. So any things gotta stay the same, and any things evidently gotta 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 simply a nicer way, or possibly a more playful way, of saying it, but it’s truly the evolution of what we do, an iteration around everything at the Academy. And that has been a large area of focus for me and my management squad over the last 4 years due to the fact that we are 66 years old. It is an iconic institution, if I could say so. And it means a lot to quite a few people, including people in the music community, but besides 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 gotta evolve as an organization.

So I spend quite a few time thinking: How can we adjust? How can we pivot? How can we see around the corner? What’s happening next? So quite a few that work, I gotta say, comes from our membership due to the fact that the membership truly submits the changes. They submit proposals. What are we going to honor in music this year? How are we going to title this fresh category? What’s the nomenclature behind this genre of music? And the reason it’s so crucial is that the members are the ones that know. They know better than I do, they know better than quite a few the staff due to the fact that our members are music professionals. So they might hear something in the fresh genre that’s coming up and be like, “Oh, you guys aren’t catching on. We gotta honor this music.” And that’s how we proceed 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 possibly the most mainstream possible audience on CBS, which is possibly the most mainstream of the broadcast networks? And all anybody truly wants to see is Taylor Swift or Beyoncé win all award. There’s a mismatch between fandom culture on the 1 side, peculiarly 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 another award like it due to the fact that 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 manufacture and who are working day in and day out around music, listening to the records or songs or albums, and then deciding which 1 they think is the best. And it’s subjective. We know that. It’s not a basketball game; it’s all up to the explanation of the listener.

But what makes our show valuable as of now, and possibly this isn’t always going to be the case, but as of now the most valuable tv show in regards to music is due to the fact that 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 besides attracts a different kind of participation or attention from the artist community due to the fact that it’s a very desirable thing to have your peers tell you you’ve done something peculiar 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 frequently gets from the larger public or from listeners? I’ll give you 1 circumstantial example just due to the fact that it is right in front of us as we head into Grammy season.

Beyoncé just doesn’t win Album of the Year or evidence of the Year. These are the awards people want her to win as 1 of the major artists in our space, 1 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 besides love a bunch of another people to win Album of the Year. I think there’s large music. I think it’s besides subjective. Beyoncé evidently 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 truly 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 another categories it doesn’t resonate. So, it’s truly hard to predict.

I am excited for this year due to the fact that there’s been so many amazing records. There’s been large work by any 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 foretell that. But what I can foretell is that the voters will do their very best to perceive to the music to measure the music. The another thing I can say is we besides have a very different voting body now than we had 3 years ago, 5 years ago, or 10 years ago.

That voting body, that’s the thing you turned over, that’s this year’s large task you announced? The change? You said earlier that you requalified 1 100 percent of the members. That’s 1 way to change the result — to change the voters.

Well, the another way is to change the awards themselves, which I’ll come to. I think we prosecute that on 2 tracks. But “we’re going to change who’s voting” is 1 way to change them. Did you actively think, “Okay, we’re getting to any of the incorrect 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 truly 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 certain our membership was typical of our music community. And erstwhile I got here, it just wasn’t. We didn’t have adequate people of color. We didn’t have adequate women. We didn’t have certain representation in certain genres, in the dance community, the stone 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 certain that it was aligned with not just the planet but, more importantly, and specifically, with music and the music community. We had to look at the genres. What genres are truly popular? Do we have adequate members in those genres to measure it accurately? What are the fresh genres coming up that we want to make certain that we’re able to interpret and vote for and get good outcomes? Then if that’s a fresh one, we gotta make certain we have members to support that. Otherwise, having a fresh category with nobody who can realize the nuance or the fine points of that genre voting is simply a failed concept. And so we want to make certain 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 100 percent of people. You’ve added fresh members. Do you think you’re there? Do you think you have area to grow, change, and evolve further? To fiddle any more?

We inactive have area to grow, no question. Where our goals were, we set those goals beautiful aggressively. We met them a bit early, actually, but there will proceed to be fresh long goals and fresh things that I want to accomplish with our membership. And our membership squad is amazing. They’re so proactive. And we have large committees around our membership squad and elected leadership who are truly 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 proceed to grow the Grammy brand on a global basis.

The another way that at least comes to head for me is the awards themselves, and possibly 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 stone Album. That implies that those genres exist, and you can neatly kind albums into them. The Grammys only got free of Best Urban Album recently. That is simply a category with a long and loaded history. possibly we don’t request that 1 anymore. But what the net has done to music broadly is truly blur genres.

Completely, endlessly blur genres in ways that are exciting, in ways that are frankly confusing. And possibly the only genre left is country, which is why everyone’s making a country album this year. due to the fact that 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 any hard lines.” Do you always think about that?

Well, I’d love to hear your thoughts more erstwhile you talk about hard lines. The goal for the genre awards is to effort and find any guardrails in which to fit music, and that’s very hard. You’re talking about, again, art and then someone’s explanation of art and how to couple those in the different buckets so the people can measure them comparatively. So, we don’t want to see hip-hop going against stone due to the fact that 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 any 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 stone 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 3 fields. So you don’t want individual who doesn’t know anything about country just going into that category due to the fact that their favourite artist is over there, or vice versa. You don’t request individual voting in classical who only knows 1 classical artist. So, the way we effort 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 small 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 squad at the Academy, you know what? We think stone and jazz sound like it’s coming together. Let’s put that in 1 category.” And erstwhile that happens, due to the fact that our members are telling us these things, it will change the way we vote.

Can you just do me a favour and effort to specify pop music in 2024?

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

Pop music is simply a bit amorphous due to the fact that it changes from year to year, and it has something to do with the word and the title itself: “pop” or “popular,” and it’s the genre that tends to have the choruses, the sing-along melodies, the right kind of production and vocalists. It’s very hard due to the fact that there are quite a few records that get lumped into pop. And as a creator, I can make it, and I can show you on a piano, and I could sing it, but it is simply a hard definition to nail down. The voters tend to do a truly good occupation of that and making certain 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 individual feels like, “Hey, this is simply 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 due to the emergence of the internet, and we’re well into it now. I think Taylor Swift wrote a part about the death of genre 10 years ago, I think, for the Wall Street Journal. There just seems to be chaos in the manufacture that possibly fans have figured out, but the manufacture itself is inactive struggling with it. Whether that’s Lil Nas X ages ago or Cowboy Carter and Beyoncé this year, it feels like we don’t rather want to draw these lines anymore, but we request them in order to have things like the Grammy Awards or have adequate awards to give out alternatively of 1 award for song.

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

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

They land by saying, our members will tell us erstwhile 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 erstwhile 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 due to the fact that our organization has never moved faster or been more fluid. We’ve never listened closer to our members or our music community. So erstwhile that starts to happen, we will make certain that things adjust.

Do you always think about just doing random micro-genres? all year, there’s a micro-genre. I’ll just choice 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, possibly 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? due to the fact that it’s something I’ve heard proposed.

Yes. And what needs to happen is, again, the voters request to have expertise in the genre. So if we had adequate voters who knew precisely what was going on in the drill genre of music, then they would pop up and say, “Guys, we’re missing a full group of music here. We request to honor it.” We would make 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 fresh genres into the show without the support and the underpinning that it needs to be applicable and accurate.

If we put a drill category in now and we didn’t have adequate voters and we had the incorrect outcomes due to the fact that just any 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 besides be, I think, detrimental to the brand of the Academy and the Grammys. So erstwhile the time is right for those fresh genres, I like to think that they’ll be there. We just added the best African Performance. You see the emergence 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 large Decoder question, and then I want to talk about that question in practice.

You evidently have quite a few decisions to make. “What awards are we going to give, and to whom?” are any 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 individual 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 another 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 effort to make certain the conversations are going in the right direction, but that truly comes down to our board and our chair. erstwhile those things are put in place, then I gotta decide how to implement them. And that’s a beautiful straightforward process around awards. But possibly the broader question you’re asking is: how do I CEO? How do I make the decisions in my role?

And I spend quite a few time listening, to be honest. And I’m not certain what the answer is for any of the another people you’ve interviewed or another CEOs, but I don’t pretend to know more than I know. I’m a life learner, not a knower. And so erstwhile it comes time for a decision, I tend to decision comparatively 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 request to make an educated and strategical 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 individual taste or feelings fall out of favour with that, then it would truly change my decision-making process due to the fact that quite a few 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 maker 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: quite a few listening, quite a few collaborating, and then trying to make smart, swift, thoughtful decisions.

I feel like quite a few the another CEOs I talk to would be well-served if they spent any time trying to make any music as opposed to just trying to make AI. [Laughs]

Let me put that into practice. You made a truly large 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 1 100 percent of the gross of the organization. You’ve been on CBS for 50 years. That’s a large change. That’s a large decision — to go to a fresh partner, fresh platforms, and fresh 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 hard decision, to be honest, due to the fact that CBS has been a large partner. They’ve done amazing work with us, I believe, for 54 shows. erstwhile I came into this role, I realized that we had 4 years until there would be a renegotiation, and I truly had a imagination 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 imagination is and make certain 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 thought behind who is going to be our partner to aid us get there was a large part of that decision-making process. We met with respective people. Ultimately, [we] ended up going with a different partner due to the fact that it truly aligned with our future vision: where we wanted to go and how we wanted to proceed to build and grow in the organization but, more importantly, how we could service more people and execute in our mission in a broader, wider, deeper scale. So we’re truly excited about the future.

You had to decide, though, right? You come onto the job, you’re renegotiating 4 years, the deal’s up, you gotta stick with CBS, or you gotta go find a fresh partner. After 50 years, it feels like possibly 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 minute where you thought, “I’ve got to make certain I know what my options are?”

That was truly the decision-making factor. I wanted to know what our options were and make certain that we were exploring all possibilities. I’m in this function temporarily, for nevertheless long I’m here, but I’m truly 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 another than to service music people. So the thought was: how can we scope the best deal? How can we find the partner that most aligns with the future imagination of the organization? So, it was an chance to research the market. I thought that only made sense, even with the 54-year past that we had with CBS, again, being large partners. I think anyone would say if you have the chance to see what else is there, you should take a look and effort 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 another options?

I will say we had another options. most likely won’t go besides much deeper than that, just out of respect for our partners on both sides. CBS has been amazing to work with, and I besides truly look forward to seeing what’s going to come next in our fresh partnership.

When I think about the value that CBS brought over that sweep of fifty-plus years, they are 1 of the 3 large broadcast networks in the United States. They have a Tiffany Network. They actually broadcast in somewhat higher quality than any of the another 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 all cable system. That’s how tv utilized to work. That is broken, right? Cord cutting is all over the place. People aren’t even utilizing over-the-air antennas anymore.

That’s just not how it works. And the large distribution is in streaming. CBS does have any streaming in the mix. There’s a full complicated communicative to be told about Paramount and all that over there, but Disney’s a small more… It’s very complicated. [Laughs] Literally, the game of Succession is embedded in me just mentioning Paramount. Disney evidently 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 request to make a lucrative tv show” is the heart of everything your organization does.

Well, you’ve nailed it. We gotta have the right tv partner, not only for the gross but besides for the future of the brand, the wellness of the organization, and for the good of the music community. What we do is effort to lift music and music creators, and how we can do that on the widest possible scale is something that I’m always reasoning about. However, as it relates to CBS and its streaming platform versus ABC or Disney, I just gotta say that CBS has been great. We’re going to make 2 more shows with them. They had quite a few very, very affirmative aspects of why we’ve been with them and why we might have considered going forward, but we besides had to look at the future of consumption. We gotta look at the future of how people are going to absorb or take in our show.

Where does it request to be seen? How does it request to be seen? These are all considerations that I’ve been having since I took this function 4 years ago. So [we’ve] got a couple more large 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 fresh deal means. But up until then, you know, your listeners and your viewers know, consumption is changing, tv 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 erstwhile we started reasoning about how we were going to decision forward over the next 10 years.

When I talk to the CEOs of streaming platforms or another kinds of video platforms, the thought that the large 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. due to the fact that 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 request something a small different than sports. They request any prestige; they request any organization heft. And it feels like, I don’t know, putting the Grammys on YouTube is just not as fancy as being anywhere close ABC and Disney. possibly even putting the Grammys on Netflix is not as fancy as being somewhere close Disney and ABC. Did that origin into your decision-making?

Yeah, it all did. The heft, as you called it, was crucial in the gravitas behind the award and where it’s consumed, and how people are going to watch it. There’s inactive something unique and peculiar about network tv to quite a few consumers. To another sets of consumers, they truly couldn’t care little about that. So, there is simply a balance or fine line that I wanted to make certain we walked with any partner that we join forces with.

Let me push on that just a small bit due to the fact that there’s a tension there. The biggest distribution you could have is YouTube. Everybody has it. possibly 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 scope for your award show, you would just put it on YouTube. But that possibly 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 most likely 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 possibly gross from Disney”?

They’re all trade-offs, to tell you the truth. And that’s the balance; it’s the juggle that we gotta do. How do we scope 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 2 things, and there are quite a few another considerations as well: the past of the brand sheen, accessibility, and different territories around the planet where there’s a presence or a focus for us. So, there were quite a few 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 another stuff you can do. You can make it more interactive; you could cut it up into different pieces. Is that stuff you’re reasoning about to reinvent the concept of an award show in that way?

One 1000 percent. We know consumers are changing the way they consume, and their habits are evolving at all times. So we’re always going to effort to be on the cutting edge of that. But again, balancing that with making certain we’re showcasing different genres of music and it’s not just 1 genre. You’re not just seeing only a certain group of creators. We besides want to make certain that we’re honoring the tradition and the past of the brand. So that along with trying to innovate, trying to make certain we’re gathering viewers where they are and matching their habits with what we’re creating or producing, is something, again… This stuff is not easy. no of it is straightforward. And if I were to have assumed the function or taken the reins of the organization and said, “We’re going to do the same thing. We’re just going to march consecutive 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: all part of our experience, all part of our show, all part of how we service our members, how we produce the show. possibly you’ve seen over the last fewer 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 quite a few fresh things over the coming years.

Yeah, that was my another question. Broadcast tv imposed a discipline on tv production, whether it’s “We’re going to have thirty-minute sitcoms alternatively of endless, you can look at your telephone 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 truly 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 any tension to it and any stakes to it. I know you’re saying that’s open, and you’re reasoning about it, but that seems crucial 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, truly at the top of my mind, for me and for our team, as to how we proceed to be relevant. due to the fact that 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 hatred to be, again, super basic about it, but it’s revenue. Making certain we’re balancing, being forward-looking, reasoning about what’s next, how people are consuming, and how we can proceed to monetize the brand and the show.

Again, not due to the fact that we want to make a profit; that’s not the motivation. The agenda is to make more gross so that we can push it back into the manufacture and back into the community. For us, it’s about the wellness and the uplifting of music. This stuff is important. Music is so dang important, especially right now, possibly more than always 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, erstwhile I travel and erstwhile I see another parts of the planet listening to music or listening to artists. We might have a crazy disagreement, but erstwhile the music comes on, everybody’s dancing and clapping and singing, and it just opens up people’s minds and their eyes.

So, due to the power of music and due to my belief and the Academy’s belief in the power of music, we’re going to do everything we can to effort and make certain 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, little artists, different genres, more voters, we’re going to proceed doing that work to change and evolve all day so that we can keep doing what we request to do to lift music people.

Let’s talk about what’s going on with music and where the money comes from in this manufacture due to the fact that that seems under quite a few force 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 realize how the economics work. That seemed unchangeable for a minute. Oops, here comes AI, and that might upend everything erstwhile again. There’s quite a few work in AI in music right now. There’s quite a few controversy. There are any beautiful 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 simply a collision course.” Last year, you said music with AI-generated elements would be Grammy-eligible. So this is an crucial check mark. Okay, we’re going to let any of this in here. Where do you think we are right now? We’ve gone through BBL Drizzy, and we’ve gone through any AI-generated beats. There’s a fistful of pieces of government that possibly 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 afraid due to the fact that AI, as it relates to human creativity, scares me to death. I know it has quite a few power and possible 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 quite a few the smartest people are investing in AI, which I totally realize due to the fact that it is so powerful and has so much potential.

But for me as a musician, as individual who besides represents 25,000 members and music people from around the world, I want to make certain 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, truly dang important. So a small tense that we haven’t got it sorted out. But I’m besides optimistic, to be honest, Nilay, due to the fact that 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 any of our most creative spaces, pull out the next amazing thing, and make large art that I don’t think any computer is going to match.

As much as we’re tense and worried about it, I don’t think you can tell me that AI can make Songs in the Key of Life, Nevermind, or Illmatic. I don’t see it happening. So, I want to make certain we’re able to usage AI, and I’m not an AI hater. I think it’s got large potential. I’ve been utilizing it for 8 or 9 years in different forms. I’ve always been an early adopter of fresh tech, so I’m with it. I get it. But we gotta make certain human creativity is protected, and we have a chance to make certain we’re remunerated properly, we have appropriate approvals, and it’s credited properly. Those are the things that are truly crucial to me.

So, I look at the manufacture right now. I brought up “BBL Drizzy.” I think that beat was made with Udio, which is 1 of the AI song-generation tools. Udio, and then its competitor, Suno, were sued by a bunch of evidence labels due to the fact that 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 failure will get resolved 1 way or the other, and then we’ll all live inside of that framework. Why let the people utilizing those tools, erstwhile no 1 knows how the money works, or even if they’re appropriate or legal, be eligible for Grammys now, before the manufacture 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, make 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 utilized artificial intelligence, you are ineligible,” would be, I think, short-sighted. And I think it would besides cut down on quite a few 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 usage 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 let 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 compose a song as a large song, but any 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 certain 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 assured that any of your work is in any of these training databases. How do you feel about that?

I believe there needs to be an knowing of what these models are training on, and I’m not certain precisely 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 individual copy written material should just be utilized or accessed by everyone to do anything they want. So, we gotta come to a bottom-line understanding. There are reasonably 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 most likely a full another show that we could dive a small 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 utilizing it to train their models?

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

By the way, for the listener, you should just go look at Harvey’s Wikipedia page due to the fact that I named 2 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 full time.

The way that you would solve this problem economically in the framework of the law that we have right now is to delegate 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 simply a large name that adds voices to likeness protections. I read any 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 velocity at which it’s moving. We are truly arrogant of the government that’s been introduced and passed in a couple of different states, but now we’re pushing for national government with the No Fakes No Frauds Act in the home and the Senate.

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

That’s not the intention.

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

Again, there’s quite a few nuances. There’s no perfect bill. no of these bills are exact. Everyone is trying to compensate and accommodate the needs of quite a few people who have concerns and fears. Of course, we don’t want to prevent individual from impersonating Elvis, but we do want to prevent people from impersonating artists or singers and utilizing their voices without any form of payment, approval, or the right crediting. And these bills are starts. I’m certain they’ll be revised. I’m certain there’ll be fresh bills and fresh things enacted. But right now, we’ve got bipartisan, bicameral support that there needs to be any government that supports and protects human creativity and artistry. So, for us, it’s the first step.

But even those 2 things you said, “We don’t want to halt Elvis impersonators, but we don’t want people to usage artist’s voices without compensation.” Yeah, that means the Elvis impersonators gotta pay. Just that small basic thing. “Don’t usage my voice for that impersonation.” Does it substance to you whether it’s AI, an Elvis impersonator, or a Britney Spears impersonator?

It does, but laws besides defend certain usage of another 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 certain any of the pennies come back to the first artists due to the fact that the streaming isn’t paying those artists. I’ll give you an example only due to the fact that 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 2 fandoms are going to come for me. But that’s the thing that happened. It’s very controversial. And then Elvis Costello, who’s 1 of my favourite 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 stone and rotation 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, due to the fact that I think it would be ludicrous. another people clearly felt differently about songs on that record.”

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

It’s all going to proceed to be a mess until we get it sorted out. due to the fact that yes, it’s difficult.

That is 1 of the most candid answers to that question I’ve always 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 evidence companies that own pieces of their catalog that tend to be more aggressive than any artists might naturally be. But as you start introducing AI, unless we can realize where it’s coming from, what it’s replicating or learning from, and trying to simulate, it’s going to be truly dang hard to figure out where the money needs to go or how the money can flow. I’ll tell you 1 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 any of the generative AI platforms, and I was showing her how they worked.

This was most likely 8 months ago. She hadn’t truly been exposed to much of it. I typed in a fewer 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 3 lyrics.” And I sent it back to the platform, and it sent back a fresh 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 3 rounds of prompts, [the track] came back [as a] somewhat different song. And she said, “Okay, I think that’s right. I think that’s human interaction.” So, no 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 curious and cared adequate to come to my studio… But the fact [is] we don’t have an knowing of how this moves forward and how we defend 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 gotta go fight this out. Someone’s going to gotta sue the copyright office, or individual else is going to gotta sue. 1 artist is going to gotta sue another. The labels are going to sue the platforms.

If we can advocate decently and loudly enough, even within the tech platforms, throughout the labels and publishers, journalists, and podcast hosts, and come to an knowing of how this needs to function, as confusing as that might be. We can start to manage any of it internally. The same thing happened erstwhile we started sampling another people’s records. We had a bunch of hit records that included another 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 net and on streaming services, and we’ve gotten to a place where we’re somewhat better, [but] there’s inactive work to do there. I believe we’ll come to any 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? due to the fact that 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 simply a beautiful 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 effort to clear a sample. There are only so many managers and lawyers. So all those people could talk, and you could say, “I request to clear the sample,” or in the case of any very celebrated songs, forget, and then individual 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 any lawyer for any artist and you effort to rotation 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? due to the fact that it seems like no 1 has any leverage over these companies.

I’m certain it’ll be messier due to the fact that it is simply a wider-reaching issue. But I do think there’s a way. possibly I’m overly optimistic in rose-colored glasses, but I think people realize the importance of music, possibly broader, the importance of art, and AI has an impact across all the different disciplines of artistry. And if we can proceed to emphasize its value and importance and point out that this has the possible to truly be harmful to it, I gotta 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 another companies.

I just think there’s a way to do it. I know everybody’s trying to build their companies and make value for their investors and shareholders. There are quite a few levels to this, but at the base, it’s music, man. It is music. We can’t have a wild, chaotic west around copyright and ownership and intellectual property protections. Stuff needs to be done decently so that we can proceed 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 another things that are-

Did you talk to Sam Altman? due to the fact that that might be his answer.

I’m hoping to. He has a favourite artist. I know he does. He has a band he grew up listening to his full life in his bedroom while he was programming any computer. He loves somebody, or he read a book that mattered, or he saw a part 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 subject 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 compose about AI, the parts of our audience that are professional creatives are furious. I’m beautiful certain that we got more responses to my interview with the CEO of Adobe that fundamentally added up to “You should have arrested him,” more than any another episode of Decoder we’ve always done. due to the fact that 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 quite a few 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 truly excited about the power and the possible of AI, and they’re all in. They’re creating by utilizing it. They’re doing everything they can utilizing AI. And neither side is wrong. Again, the beauty of music, art, or creativity [is that] everybody creates differently. So, my function is simply a hard one. It’s to effort and service our membership and our music community reasonably and in a way that allows for a bright future for our creators. Whether that’s utilizing AI, limiting AI, or making certain there are guidelines around AI — it’s to be determined. But my focus, erstwhile I wake up, is to make certain our human creativity is healthy, it’s allowed to endure, and we can proceed to make a living.

We have a full 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 due to the fact that 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 another day, and there was a female 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 simply a human emotion. And so I want to make certain that we’re realizing, yes, AI is simply a part of that. How can it be integrated in a way that’s liable and reasonable?

Yeah. Well, Harvey, I got to let you go, but I can’t let you go without asking 1 question I’ve been dying to ask you the full time. Who’s a young artist on the come-up that people should be paying attention to? due to the fact that I know you have a full view of this industry.

I do. I have a view of any of the coolest and best fresh artists in music. 1 of my favourite parts of the occupation is getting to meet these creators. But I’m going to ruin the question due to the fact that it would be irresponsible of me to tell you who the next individual was or individual that I love due to the fact that 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 fresh creators making music, making large art than in the past of music due to the access, due to the technology, due to the young female I saw on the plane programming on a laptop like this, due to 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 large fresh artists in hip-hop. I’ve now heard a fresh crop of incredible stone bands, which I think we’ve had a small bit of a shortage of. I’ve heard… evidently that [there’s a] decision into country and any large fresh 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 truly excited about. So I mean, I don’t know. I can geek out all day on music and fresh music, but this is simply a subject that I love to talk about. large music, large fresh 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 gotta find you; we’re going to gotta talk about music any another time, just for an hour. Thank you so much for coming to Decoder.