‘It’s the future’: Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. on AI in the music industry

The three years that Harvey Mason Jr. has been CEO of the Recording Academy have been some of the most eventful in the music industry since Napster upended the idea that people have to pay for music. At least then, peer-to-peer sharing was the industry’s sole existential threat. 

Though most people know about the Grammys, the Recording Academy also engages with issues that its membership of musicians, producers, and songwriters care about, such as royalty payments for radio plays and transparency in the ticketing industry. Lately, Mason—a songwriter and music producer—has been focused on how AI could affect Academy members. While revamping the Grammys’ structure and approach to the telecast, Mason signed the Academy onto the year-old Human Artistry Campaign, a cross-industry coalition focused on responsible AI use. Mason also adjusted Grammy eligibility rules to allow for use of emerging AI production tools while still prioritizing artists’ very human contributions to music. 

The Recording Academy has also pushed for legislation around artist likenesses and voices being used in AI content. In March, Tennessee passed the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act (ELVIS) Act—a first-in-the-nation law that protects an artist’s voice alongside their name, image, and likeness; Illinois passed its similar Digital Voice and Likeness Protection Act in August. Both efforts were backed by the Academy, which mobilized local chapters and artists to lobby officials in those states. Following Congressional hearings on AI and copyright earlier this year, at which Mason testified, both the House and Senate have taken up the issue. The Senate’s No Fakes Act and the House’s No AI Fraud Act offer national analogs to the Tennessee and Illinois laws, with the House version including protections on name, image, and voice for everyone, not just recording artists.

At the same time, Mason has been expanding the audience for the Grammys. The awards have added categories like Best Pop Dance Recording and Best African Music performances, and its broadcast has been reaching a larger audience every year. Viewership of the 2024 Grammy Awards hit 16.9 million, marking a 34% increase over 2023, which had itself seen a 31% increase in viewership over 2022. 

Mason recently sat down with Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies podcast to discuss AI, the Grammys, and how he’s growing the Academy’s membership. Below is a condensed and edited version of that conversation. 

What’s the general feeling toward AI in the music industry right now?

It’s a really wide range between completely scared to death of AI and, on the other side, people who are all in and think it’s the future, who know that AI is going to have a huge impact in how we create and is going to be extremely disruptive, so you might as well get on board and start adopting right now.

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

We’ve had some early successes and traction working along with other groups, of course, both in Tennessee, where they passed the state law, as well as in Illinois, give some protection to artists or voice actors and making sure that they have control over their image and their likeness and their voice. Federally, we’ve been really pushing hard on a couple of bills called No Fakes Act and the No AI Frauds Act coming through the House and the Senate.

The Academy has adopted rules around the eligibility of songs that use AI. As someone who worked in production, how did you approach balancing the way these tools can unlock creativity with responsible use by artists? 

Having AI involvement does not disqualify, in general. But if you’re trying to submit a song for Grammy recognition, there has to be human involvement in the category that you’re submitting in. So a simple example is if I am an artist and AI wrote the song as a songwriter. As an artist, I would still be eligible for the “performance” category of Record of the Year. I would not be eligible for a songwriting category.

Not only am I a creator, but the Academy represents creators. So it puts us in a unique spot. We want to advocate for our human creators. We also want to make sure they’re able to use any new tool, any new technology, and have it at their disposal to create great new works of art. 

We know technology is always going to be something that songwriters, producers, artists, and others in our community are going to want to use. We’ve all done it. The drum machine, synthesizers, pro tools, auto tune—those are all technological advancements in how we created music.

I’m optimistic about what AI can bring to the table when used as a resource. I’m more nervous about it when you start thinking, Is there a world in which it replaces human creativity? You start hearing about these companies that are churning out massive numbers of songs. You start hearing about channels on [streaming] platforms that are exclusively featuring AI-generated music with very little or no human interaction or involvement.

Since you became CEO, the Grammys has added categories and seen viewership increase. Why is that broadcast so meaningful?

The success of our TV show drives everything we do. We charge CBS a licensing fee. That fee comes to us at the Academy. All the money gets used for the programs that we do—whether that’s [the Academy’s artist-support nonprofit] MusiCares, or the Grammy Museum [in Los Angeles], or the advocacy in D.C. and the state and local levels. We’re spending tens of millions of dollars in all these different areas to support and uplift music people.

One of my goals was to make sure that we were able to sustain and even grow and expand the TV show. That started with membership, which drives the voting. So we took all 12, 000 voting members and requalified all of them. So if you didn’t have enough credits [contributions to recordings] in a current window, you could no longer continue to vote. We needed more people from classical music. 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 space to be evaluating some of the genres that had typically been underserved.

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

Are you ever worried about how fans will respond to the Grammys if their favorite artist gets nominated and doesn’t win?

Sometimes the votes go in a way that we wouldn’t expect or consumers wouldn’t expect. That’s something that makes me a little bit nervous, because there are great artists that don’t win [who] maybe should win. And there are great artists [who] are angry that they didn’t win, or there are fan bases that this person should have won. But I take a lot of solace in the fact that the Academy is utilizing the show and celebrating these incredible artists to do more deep and impactful work around the year. 

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