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

Today I’m talking with Harvey Mason Jr., who is CEO of the Recording Academy — that’s the outfit that puts on the Grammy Awards. I last talked to Harvey in 2024, when it was obvious that generative AI would upend the music industry, but still not exactly clear how that would happen. 

Well, it’s been 18 months since that conversation, and you’re going to hear Harvey say that AI is now “omnipresent” in music production. And Harvey knows what he’s talking about — he is himself a legendary producer who’s worked with everyone from Janet Jackson to Beyoncé. Harvey has said that every session he’s been in recently has had AI in it, and I really wanted to know what that meant — what kinds of tools are musicians using, in what way, and what kind of music is it making for us? Is it any good? 

Because, as it stands, there’s an exponential increase in the rate of AI music creation. Streaming platform Deezer reports that more than 50,000 AI-generated songs are being uploaded every day. All that AI-generated music is getting harder to identify and filter out, while at the same time, tools like Suno have become mainstream parts of the creative process for musicians of all kinds. So I really wanted to know how Harvey experiences all of that and balances his role running the Grammy Awards, especially since the Recording Academy’s rules say that AI music isn’t eligible for the industry’s highest honors.

There’s a lot going on in this one. Harvey and I also talked about the Grammys moving to Disney after years on CBS and what it means to reach new younger audiences with award shows in the age of TikTok. If you’re a Decoder listener, you know that I’m always saying that whatever happens to the music industry happens to everything else five years later, and this conversation really underlined that for me.

Okay, Harvey Mason Jr., the CEO of the Recording Academy, on the future of AI and music. Here we go. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Harvey Mason Jr., you’re a songwriter, you’re a producer, and you’re the CEO of the Recording Academy. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thank you. Good to be here, man.

I’m excited to talk to you. It’s been about a year and a half since you were on the show. A lot has happened in a year and a half. I actually just want to start with a lightning round of the Decoder questions. I ask every CEO the same question, but I have so much on my list that I’m just going to do a check-in on whether these things have changed.

You’re the CEO of the Recording Academy, and that’s the organization that puts on the Grammys. You run MusiCares for Charity. It’s the social support system for most of the musicians in the United States. How is the Recording Academy structured? How many people work there, and has it changed at all in the past year and a half?

It’s definitely changed. We continue to grow and progress and try to do more, reach more people. As you said, we serve music and all the people that make it in a lot of different ways through our Grammy organization, which includes the Grammy Museum, MusiCares, as you mentioned, our advocacy efforts in DC, working with state lawmakers around the country, and then of course the Grammy show. And so we’re a little over 300 people, so it’s not a massive organization, but we punch above our weight, and we do a lot of work, and we’re very active.

The way that it’s changed is that I think we’re doing a good job of keeping up with the changes that are happening, and that is nonstop, especially with technology, new styles of delivering music, creating music, and consuming music. And then also trying to make sure that we’re staying in tune or relevant with what’s happening in music genres, things that are happening. New popularity comes up. People are consuming different styles of music, music from different parts of the world. All those are things that are ever-changing, and I love that our organization is moving quickly and staying ahead of a lot of those things.

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

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

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

No. If I didn’t include the collaborative approach of decision-making, I was probably thinking too fast, and you might have caught me on the lightning round. A big part of my decision-making is gathering information from people that I trust and people that are around me. And people who are experts, because I don’t pretend to be the expert in every department of what we do. I do think I have a great group of people who give a lot of different insight and diverse perspectives, and really specialized thinking. And I come from sports. I played basketball, as you know. I’m a songwriter, as you know, and those are team efforts. You write songs together; you’re not sitting in a room all by yourself, at least the way that I work. You do that with other people. And the best idea wins, and the same for sports. You have a role on a team. If you’re great at that one role, you do that. You don’t try to do everything. So that has always been my style of leadership or decision-making.

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

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

The reason I ask all this is that I feel like if we rewound the clock 5, 10 years ago, I could understand the music industry. And my thesis on the show is that if you pay attention to what happens to the music industry, you will know what will happen to every other creative industry five years from now. The change is always fastest in music. 

Five years ago, okay, we’ve come through the shift to streaming. Artists understand they’re going to get paid pennies on the dollar from Spotify, even if they got a billion streams. We have to find other revenue lines. We’re going to do sync licenses, where everyone’s going to do a Keds ad. We’re going to be on tour all day and all night.

Keds, that’s a deep cut, but thank you.

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

I do. I don’t know all the ins and outs of it, but from what I’m reading, and I’m probably reading a lot of the same things you are. It seems like it’s a very, very serious issue, and it seems like we’ve been trying to deal with ticketing issues for some time now. There are some discrepancies in the information that we’re hearing. Hopefully, we can get to the bottom of some of it. Obviously, there are legal cases going on, but the vibes in the industry from what I’m seeing are that there’s a lot of trepidation. There’s a lot of concern.

There are fears around some of the ticketing issues, but also AI. And I’m sure that’s the topic that is at the tip of everyone’s tongue. But I also see a lot of opportunity. There’s more music being created and more music being listened to. There are a lot of live opportunities out there. I know you mentioned some that have been canceled, but there are others that are doing really, really well. I was just at Coachella a couple of weeks ago. And what a spectacle, what an amazing event and series of events. Now you see they sold out for next year without even announcing a lineup. So there are things that are working really, really well.

The reason I’m pushing and I’m starting with live [performances] is again, five, 10 years ago, I think the industry figured it out; there’s stuff we can monetize, and there’s stuff we can’t. And the idea that the music itself was hard to monetize, I think that was a paradigm shift in the industry. You’re going to cut a record, and that thing is not going to make you all the money, unless you’re at the very top of the game. It’s all the other stuff that’s going to make you money. That pressure has led to rising ticket prices. Post-COVID, everyone’s going to be on tour forever.

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

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

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

I would like to think we find a way to allow people to go to concerts. But again, if you look at where we’re headed as a society, it just seems like the cost of things is running away from us.

Right next to that, there’s a big lawsuit against Ticketmaster. The federal government settled, and Ticketmaster agreed to some changes with the federal government, as part of that settlement. I think the state attorneys general did not think it was strong enough. They pursued the case; they’ve won; something else is going to happen. Do you see the Ticketmaster case having an impact already, and do you see a bigger impact in the future?

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

I feel like it was understood how to make money in live events, and that is shaky right now. The idea that tours are getting canceled or we’re oversupplying a market with rising costs, and people are going to pick gas and groceries over seeing their favorite artists — that’s unsettling, I think, in the industry.

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

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

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

[Laughs] Zero minutes.

I watched Coachella from social media, and I was like, “Oh, there’s a whole other thing happening here.” That’s the other dynamic. The music industry has become way more commercial. Coachella is the influencer Olympics; it has all of the brand activations. There’s something there where it’s, okay, the money has to come from somewhere. It’s going to come from credit card companies or travel agencies or whatever’s happening, brand activations.

Packaging. Yeah.

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

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

So yeah, I love all the different things that people have figured out how to make money — they monetize music, performances, live, or merch, and even food. You see food coming together with music; you see sports coming together with music. Those are great things. Those things make me excited because of my passion for music and music people.

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

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

So the last time you were on the show, I’ll just read you some of the quotes. “I don’t think you can tell me that AI can create Songs in the Key of Life, Nevermind, or Illmatic.” And then you said, “It’s all going to be a mess until we get it sorted out because yes, it’s difficult.” It’s been 18 months. Has your thinking evolved dramatically on how AI can deliver quality, and how musicians should use it?

It has, honestly, and it’s crazy. I never thought it would change, but actually, that’s not true. I knew it was going to change, because it’s all been changing so fast. But the quality of what it’s able to create has improved dramatically. I remember 18 months ago, you could tell when something was AI-generated. And now it’s to the point where people are playing me things and telling me that AI made it, and I’m surprised. I’m impressed by the quality of it. And all that scares me because I do represent roughly 30,000 music people and then millions of music people around the world that have grown up their whole lives trying to figure out how to express themselves by using a guitar or a keyboard and writing their heartfelt lyrics. Now you can prompt some of that stuff. And it’s darn good, which I don’t know if I love or don’t love, but it’s evolved over the last 18 months.

You’re still a working producer and a songwriter. I know you’re still in sessions. You gave a quote in January. You said, “I’ve seen AI in every studio, in every session. I’m not remembering a song I’ve been around or a room I’ve been in that was not using some form of AI.”

I have been mulling that quote since January, when you said it on stage. I’ve been dying to have you in this chair to ask you about that quote. How is it being used? How is it changing the process of songwriting from your vantage point as a producer and a songwriter? And then obviously, as somebody who represents the interests of all the songwriters?

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

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

I talked a lot about my niece. She does a lot of AI creating, and she sends songs to my wife and says, “Look at the song I wrote.” She’s in sixth grade. And so it’s definitely a challenge for me, but I also have to understand that both in my role as a producer and my role as a CEO, there’s got to be a balance because AI is here, people are going to use it. There’s competition out there. Songwriters, artists, producers, they’re all competing for a certain number of ears.

And a lot of them, they don’t care how they get to those ears; they just want to get to them. So I am struggling with making sure we’re preserving human creativity while also allowing technology to evolve the craft and the art form of creating and writing songs. So it’s not an easy struggle for me because I am a creator, but I’m also overseeing or trying to help serve music people in the music community in my role as CEO.

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

Very different.

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

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

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

Oh, I have a very different view of country music. I think there’s an image, and then I think there’s an industry.

A reality. Well, I’ve definitely witnessed some people in that space using AI, and it just has to be… You have to figure out how you’re going to use it. Is it going to be a tool or is it going to be a replacement? And that is going to change per industry. I’ve seen people who are doing film scores now using it in a way that I never imagined. They’re playing individual instrument lines into the generative platform, and then that will, in turn, create a full arrangement. So maybe you’re playing a line on a piano, and then it turns it into strings, violins, violas, cellos, and basses, and it splits it out on a score. And then they’ll just hire the orchestras to play it. But they will not have to do any of the arranging, the composing, or even making the charts. It’s doing all that for you. So you’re going to see it used in different ways in different forms of music making, which you’re already seeing, as you said, in country versus pop versus composing.

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

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

So, younger people… This is polling that we have cited a lot on this show and across The Verge. Younger people, the more they use AI, the more they dislike it. So Gen Z has this ferocious dislike for AI. I bring this up not to litigate the poll numbers with you. I’m just curious about the sort of widespread use of AI, and the knowledge that most artists have that their fans don’t want them to say they’re using AI.

So Michelle Lewis told Rolling Stone the music industry has a quote, “Don’t ask, don’t tell policy about AI music.” Suno is one of the big generative AI platforms, maybe the dominant one; its CEO, Mikey Shulman, says, “Suno is the Ozempic of the music industry. Everybody’s on it. Nobody wants to talk about it.”

That’s the gap, right? Everyone’s using the tools, everyone sees the power of the tools, but we cannot tell our fans straight out that we’re using AI to make the music. Do you see that gap closing or do you see it widening?

I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s going to close or widen. For us at the academy, we are in a challenging position because we have to award excellence in music. And we are now every year deciding what is going to be the threshold of acceptability for AI. So that’s going to probably have an effect on how the gap widens or closes because we ask when you submit, “Did you use AI?” But acknowledging it’s like Ozempic, some people are going to tell you they’re on it, some people are not. It’s a little bit of taking people’s word for it until we can find the technology or deploy the technology, which I know is supposedly out there, that can determine when AI is being used, and how much it’s being used. We are a little bit at the mercy of people telling us and disclosing when they’re using it.

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

Did you see the recent sort of social media discourse about whether the “D.O.A. (Death Of Auto-Tune)” held up as an idea from Jay-Z? It’s like, now it’s everywhere. It didn’t actually die. It took over everything.

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

I’ve got big artists saying basically, adapt or die. Diplo, “I can get the best voice from AI. I don’t need anybody to sing the song anymore.” Literally, he said adapt or become an Uber driver.

Timberland is doing straight AI artists. He’s got an entire record labeled for his AI artist. 50 Cent just loves posting memes of soul covers of 50 Cent songs. Grimes exists. Taryn Southern is out there. What’s your take on how it’s the bigger artists who are going to adopt AI faster because they have the name recognition, they can put out AI music, and people will listen to it because it is 50 Cent, Grimes, or whoever? And the younger artists are struggling for attention because they’re swamped on social channels full of slop.

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

The other thing that’s going to be important is that humans are going to create the coolest, newest stuff. I don’t think, and in 18 months we can talk again, but I don’t think AI is going to go out ahead of us and beat us at coming up with a new sound, a new genre, something that’s fresh and exciting, that lands and resonates with listeners. They will, at some point, maybe figure out how to do that. But what they’re going to do now is they’re going to listen to all the cool stuff that we make. Then, they’re going to iterate on that, and they’re going to probably add a little twist here, mash some stuff together, and come out with a new song, a new voice, or a new singing.

But as humans and as creators who are living life and experiencing things, we are going to be the ones that push the art form forward. I truly believe that, and this month we’ll see. So you’ll have both. You’ll have people using AI and just creating a whole bunch of music, and you’ll have other people say, “I want to do it my way. I want to create through my experience and through my pain and through my interactions.” And that’ll be cool.

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

It’s okay.

That’s okay?

AI doesn’t make you ineligible. It doesn’t exclude you from the process. We just have to make sure that human creativity is at the forefront and there is human creativity. So if somebody submits songs with AI background vocals, they’re not going to get a Grammy for performance because AI is doing the performing. But you can still submit for songwriting or some of the other categories. And conversely, if AI has written the song but you have a human singing it and they sang the heck out of it, that person can be submitted for a performance award. 

We acknowledge — and this is why it’s a fine line — that we’re walking the tightrope right now. And we want to make sure we’re honoring human creativity; we want to honor excellence. We have to acknowledge that AI is being used, and at some point we’ll have to decide: do we want to completely ban AI from the process and say, if you used AI at all, you are excluded from the Grammy process? Or are we going to say AI is the next version of a tool for music making and people are using it in different ways? Some of them are really interesting and creative, but some of them seem egregious and too much. We’re going to have to find that sweet spot, and that’s what we’re doing every single year. 

We review this policy, we look at it and make sure that we’re doing the thing that our board of trustees, our members, and our creative community want, because we listen to our creative community. So that’s what I see. The future is navigating that, and I think it’s going to evolve over time.

Where’s the line right now? How much is too much?

Right now we call it more than a de minimis amount of human creativity involved in the process. So as long as you can show that a human was involved and it wasn’t just a tiny amount, then we will say it’s acceptable. But as soon as it gets beyond that point of none or not enough human interaction, then we have to pull back. And it’s not a perfect system. I mean, it is a very, very tough system to create because again, we don’t know exactly the percentage of human creativity or human interaction. We don’t have the ability to determine that today. I hope that we do in the future. We acknowledge that it is not the most perfect system, and music, by the way, is subjective as you know. So we’re evaluating and trying to award something that means something different to everybody.

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

I know you’ve been advocating for specific litigation. I do want to come to that. I just want to stay on this aspect of it for one second. You’re saying that to win a Grammy Award, you need to show us that there’s more than a de minimis amount of human involvement. I can’t just prompt Suno to make a hit record: “Make a song like Harvey would make for Janet Jackson.” Which actually sounds like a great Suno prompt. I’m going to do that when I get out of here. 

Okay, that’s not enough. How do you prove it? Do you have to submit paperwork? Do you have to submit screenshots? What’s the proof?

We have screening committees that review and evaluate people’s claims, and at some point it does come down to people’s opinions and people doing the analysis and asking questions, asking for proof, asking for documentation. We’re not always going to get that, but we’re going to try. And as I said, it’s not a perfect science. We don’t have a black-and-white determining box that you can check that exactly proves that you’ve done what you’ve said you’ve done, but I know that our community is an honorable community. 

People who make music are… Creators are different people. I don’t think anybody wants to cheat and win a Grammy on grounds that they can’t prove. And I would hate to think that somebody would want to do that. Maybe it happens, and hopefully we’ll catch them before it does, but it’s just not the perfect system. It’s going to be challenging to determine exactly who did what. And until we can get the technology that breaks it down for us, we’re going to have to rely on our community to be forthcoming.

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

We’ll see. So far, we haven’t. We had about 24,000 submissions last year. Now it’s up a little bit from the year before, and we’ll see what happens this year. And if that starts to happen, then we’ll have to make changes. The cool thing about our organization, at least over the last five or six years, is we’ve really been quick to change. 

We’re watching what’s happening, we’re listening, we’re hearing from our music people, and we’re saying, how can we make sure we’re doing this the right way? So if we start to get overwhelmed, AI becomes an issue for us, we can’t determine what’s happening, we’re getting inundated, or the whole thing is getting diluted by AI, then we’re going to make some changes. But right now, I think we’re in a pretty good spot.

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

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

I’m not sure if it will be 18 months from now. Maybe we’ll be more concerned about it, but maybe we’ll be less, and it’ll be like drum machines. You’ll say, “Some AI was used in this recording, but do I care?” I care as the CEO of the Grammys, and I care about representing human music people. And again, we’re going to have to, in the background, continue to fight and push and advocate for human creativity, but consumers aren’t worried right now if a vocal has autotune on it. They’re not thinking about if the strings are real strings in the ballad that they just listened to and that they loved.

So I’m not sure I have the answer, but we’re going to see how it changes over time and how consumers’ appetite for different forms of creativity and different tools being used in that process play out.

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

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

I like your optimism. My pushback here is that drum machines, for the most part, were not made by defense contractors. Maybe Yamaha had some sort of defense contractor, but for the most part, the instrument companies, the sampler companies… Pioneer was not making military targeting systems. 

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, all the big model companies are defense contractors. They’re caught up in the top of the government controversies every single day. They’re asking everyone for billions, if not trillions, of dollars. We’re going to put the data centers in space. At least from my perspective, it seems like the interests of artists and creatives, authors, they know it’s bad, but they’re like, “Hold on, we have war. We’re going to do war with the AI models. We’re going to argue about cybersecurity because maybe we’re going to crash the whole world.”

Have they been responsive to you? The last time you were on the show, I asked if you met with Sam Altman, and you’re like, “I’m hoping to.” Have you met with him since?

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

I appreciate it.

But I think everybody wants to do this the right way, and maybe they’re tricking me. From what I can tell, they realize the importance of music and creativity, and nobody wants to upend that completely. At least the music people that I talk to that are running those companies, they’re fans, and they love music, and they love creativity, and they want to add to that ecosystem. So we’ll see where it goes. 

I am optimistic, but I think my optimism comes more from the fact that I know our community an