‘The Future’: Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. on AI in the music industry

For three years Harvey Mason Jr. who has become the CEO of the Recording Academy has been one of many events in the music industry since Napster took away the idea that people should pay for music. At least at the time, peer-to-peer sharing was the industry’s existential threat.

Although most people know about the Grammys, the Recording Academy is also involved in issues that its membership of artists, producers, and songwriters care about, such as radio play awards and transparency in the ticket industry. Recently, Mason — a songwriter and producer — has been focusing on how AI can affect Academy members. While revamping the Grammys’ structure and broadcast system, Mason signed the Academy to the year-old Human Art Campaign, a multi-industry coalition focused on harnessing AI. Mason also tweaked the Grammy eligibility rules to allow for the use of emerging AI production tools while prioritizing more human artists. contributions to music.

The Recording Academy also pushed for legislation regarding the similarity of artists and voices used in AI content. In March, Tennessee passed the Voice and Image Verification (ELVIS) Act—the first law in the nation to protect an artist’s voice alongside their name, image, and likeness; Illinois passed its own Digital Voice and Likeness Protection law in August. Both efforts were supported by the Academy, which brought together local chapters and artists to lobby officials in those states. After a Congressional hearing on AI and copyright earlier this year, where Mason testified, the House and Senate took up the issue. The Senate’s No Fakes Act and the House’s No Fakes Act provide national analogs to the laws in Tennessee and Illinois, with the House version including protection for everyone’s name, image, and voice, not just recording artists.

At the same time, Mason has been expanding the audience at the Grammys. The awards have added categories such as Best Pop Dance Recording and Best African Music performances, and their broadcasts have reached large audiences every year. Viewership for the 2024 Grammy Awards reached 16.9 million, marking a 34% increase over 2023, which saw a 31% increase in viewership in 2022.

Mason just sat down with him Fast Companies for the Newest Companies podcast to discuss AI, the Grammys, and how to grow Academy membership. Below is a condensed and edited version of that interview.

What is the general feeling about AI in the music industry right now?

It’s a really wide distance between fearing the death of AI and, on the other hand, all the people who are inside and thinking about the future, who know that AI will have a huge impact on the way we create and will be. very annoying, so you might as well get on board and start taking it right now.

There are a few concerns about AI in the music industry. There’s how generative AI models are trained and then there’s the concern of using AI to impersonate people. What does the Recording Academy do on both sides?

We’ve had early and follow-up success working with other groups, of course, both in Tennessee, where they passed state law, and in Illinois, giving some protection to artists or voice actors and making sure they have control. over their image, their form, and their voice. Legislatively, we’ve been pushing hard on several bills called the No Fakes Act and the No Fake AI Act that’s coming through the House and Senate.

The Academy has adopted rules regarding the eligibility of songs using AI. As someone who has worked in production, how have you approached measuring how these tools can open up creativity through the honest use of artists?

AI participation is not limited, in general. But if you’re trying to submit a song for Grammy consideration, there has to be someone involved in the category you’re submitting to. So a simple example is if I’m an artist and the AI ​​writes a song as a songwriter. As an artist, I would still qualify for the “performance” category of Record of the Year. I won’t qualify for the songwriting category.

Not only am I a creator, but the Academy represents creators. So it puts us in a unique position. We want to represent our human creators. We also want to make sure that they know how to use any new tool, any new technology, and have them to create great new works of art.

We know that technology will always be something that songwriters, producers, musicians, and others in our community will want to use. We’ve all done it. Drum machines, synthesizers, professional instruments, auto-tuning—those are all technological advances in the way we create music.

I am optimistic about what AI can bring to the table when used as a resource. I’m very nervous about it when you start thinking, Is there a world that takes the place of human creativity? You start hearing about these companies that produce a lot of songs. You start hearing about channels [streaming] platforms with only AI-generated music with little or no human interaction.

Since becoming CEO, the Grammys have added categories and seen an increase in viewership. Why does that broadcast make so much sense?

The success of our TV show drives everything we do. We charge CBS a license fee. That money comes to us at the Academy. All the money goes to the programs we do—whatever that is [the Academy’s artist-support nonprofit] MusiCares, or the Grammy Museum [in Los Angeles]or representation at the DC and state and local levels. We spend tens of millions of dollars in all these different areas to support and promote music people.

One of my goals was to make sure we were able to sustain and grow and expand the TV program. That started with membership, which drives voting. So we took all 12,000 voting members and qualified them all. So if you didn’t have enough credits [contributions to recordings] in the current window, you can no longer continue voting. We needed more classical music people. We definitely needed more women. So we invited 2,500 new women voters in just three years. We also needed more people of color—we didn’t have enough diversity in that area to explore some of the previously neglected species.

That allowed us to improve our nominations and ultimately improve who won the Grammy Awards, which in turn improved the relevance of our show and attracted more viewers to the show.

Do you ever worry about how fans will react to the Grammys if their favorite artist is nominated but doesn’t win?

Sometimes the votes go the way we didn’t expect or the buyers didn’t expect. It’s something that scares me, because there are great musicians who don’t win [who] maybe it should win. And there are great musicians [who] they are upset that they didn’t win, or there are fans who should have won this person. But I take great comfort in the fact that the Academy uses the program and celebrates these amazing artists to do deep and impactful work throughout the year.