YouSaid · the spoken record

Harvey Mason Jr.

lines on the record: 90
first: 2024-11-11
most recent: 2024-11-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The framework for making decisions around awards is very different than my personal framework around decisions that I'd like to implement at the academy. As it relates to awards, it's a very straightforward process. Awards or other changes and proposals are introduced by our members. They're discussed through appropriate committee, whether it's planning and governance or awards and nominations, goes through the committee system, they vote it up or down, it then goes to the board of trustees and gets voted up or down. And I don't have a vote in those things. I try and make sure the conversations are going in the right direction, but that really comes down to our board and our chair. Once those things are put in place, then I have to decide how to implement them. And that's a pretty straightforward process around awards. But maybe the broader question you're asking is like, how do I personally CEO? How do I make the decisions in my role?”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me ask you the big Dakota question. About that question in practice. You obviously have a lot of decisions to make. What awards are we going to give and who is some of the biggest decisions there? What's your framework for making those decisions?”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A drill category in now, and we didn't have enough voters and we had the wrong outcomes because just some random people started voting. Oh, I know this name. Let me vote for them. It would be disrespectful to the creators in that genre would also be, I think, detrimental to the brand of the academy and the Grammy. So when the time is right for those new genres, I like to think that they'll be there. We just added the best African performance. You see the rise of a piano and all the different genres, afrobeats. And we had the voters. We had the support. They proposed the award. It's now in.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and what tends to need to happen is, again, the voters need to have an expertise in the genre. So if we had enough voters that knew exactly what was going on in the drill genre of music, then they would pop up and say, guys, we're missing a whole group of music here. We need to honor it. We would create the category. We'd go up in the next show, and they would then vote. But without that movement, without the momentum behind the genre that's sustainable, that translates into members. We would be popping new genres into the show without the support and kind of the underpinning that it needs to be relevant and to be accurate. Because if we put a”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You ever think about just doing random micro genres? Like, we're just going to have a drill award this year? Like, how do you think about that? Because that's another way you could do it and you could get more artists in the theater. You could sell more tickets. You could get more ratings. But drill music was a moment. It's now kind of everywhere. Like you can hear it in fact all of hip hop. So it is kind of like devolved and it's not being a micro genre, but just being a sound that's going to come and go like sounds going to go. But last year you could have just been like, we're going to have a drill category. And here's the best drill artist of the year. And then next year, maybe we won't have that category and we'll have something else. Is that something that comes up? Is that an option that you've thought about? Because it's something I've heard proposed.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By saying our members will tell us when it's time. And the members, again, are professionals. They're all the people working in studios on tours, engineers, writers, producers, artists, singers. They're the professionals. And when they say, you know what, we're tired of genres or we're tired of separating people and putting them in boxes, then we'll evolve. I can promise you that because our organization is never move faster, has never been more fluid. We've never listened closer to our members or our music community. So when that starts to happen, we will make sure that things adjust.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And is that something you're actively talking about? Does that come up with your members, with the staff of the Recording Academy? Where do these arguments really come from? Where do these arguments land?”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just think there's something so interesting with genre because of the rise of the internet. And we're well into it now. Yeah. Think Taylor Swift wrote a piece about the death of John Ren years ago For the Wall Street Journal, and there just seems to be a chaos in the industry that maybe fans have figured out, but the industry itself is still struggling with. Whether that's Lil Naz ages ago, whether that's Cowboy Carter and Beyonce this year, it feels like we don't quite want to draw these lines anymore, but we need them in order to have things like the Grammy Awards or have enough awards to give out instead of one award for song.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pop music is a bit amorphous because it changes from year to year and it has something to do with the term and the title itself popular and it's the genre that tends to have the big choruses, the sing-along melodies, the right style of production and vocalist. And it's very difficult because there are a lot of records that get lumped into pop. And as a creator, I can create it and I can show you on a piano and I can sing it. But it is a hard definition to nail down. The voters tend to do a really good job of that and making sure that they're voting for music they feel should be in that category. And also the way our labels and artists and independent labels submit, they submit their music where they want to be. And so if somebody feels like, hey, this is a pop record. It'll go into pop. And for the most part, that's where it's evaluated.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when that happens, because our members are telling us these things, it will happen and that will change the way we vote.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We encourage our voters to vote in three fields so you don't want somebody who doesn't know anything about country just going into that category because they're favorite artists over there or vice versa you don't need someone voting in classical that only knows one classical artist so the way we try and do it is have qualified voters voting for the music that they like now to your point as music changes and genre walls come down we'll be able to open that up a little bit more but that is again something that will be determined by our professional music community our members will say hey harvey you know what membership team at the academy you know what we think rock and jazz sound like it's coming together let's put that in one category”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd love to hear your thoughts more when you talk about hard lines. The goal for the genre awards is to try and find some guardrails in which to fit music. And that's very hard. You're talking about, again, art and someone's interpretation of art and how to couple those in the different buckets so the people can evaluate them comparatively. So we don't want to see hip-hop going against rock because they're so dissimilar. dissimilar audiences, I think, dissimilar people that are creating. But as music becomes more and more blurred together or mashed up, I guess I'll say, there will be some conversations around how we're going to title the words, how we're going to include them in different fields, and who should be voting on them. Right now we have different fields. So you have a rock field, and under that will be a bunch of different genres of rock. Then you'll have a hip-hop field and a classical field. And the way our voting works is...”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, smashes up completely endlessly blur genre in ways that are exciting and ways that are frankly confusing. And maybe the only genre left is country, which is everyone's making a country album this year Because you can just go there and say it's different than what you were doing before. You could change those awards, right? You could just requalify all the genres too and say, here are some hard lines. Do you ever think about that?”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We still have room to grow, no question where our goals were. We set those goals pretty aggressively. We met them a bit early, actually. But they'll continue to be new stretch goals and new things that I want to accomplish with our membership. And our membership team is amazing. They're so proactive. And we have great committees around our membership team and elected leadership who we were really passionate about membership. And as we said until I hear your ideas, for now, that's the way we think we can affect change and the outcomes and affect the relevance of our awards and continue to grow the Grammy brand on a global basis.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're at the end of the process now you've requalified 100% of people, you've added new members. Do you think you're there? Do you think you have room to grow and change and evolve further? To fiddle some more”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aligning with not just the world, but more importantly and specifically with music and the music community, the genres, we had to look at the genres. What genres are really popular? Do we have enough members in those genres to evaluate it accurately? What are the new genres coming up that we want to make sure that we're able to interpret and vote for and get good outcomes? Well, then if that's a new one, we got to make sure we have members to support that. Otherwise, having a new category with nobody that can understand the nuance or the fine points of that genre voting, it's a failed concept. And so we want to make sure that the voters align with music and how it's being made and consumed.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It didn't come so much from the answers. Maybe personally I did. I backed that up. But what it really stemmed from was looking at the makeup of our voting body and then looking at the makeup of music creators and who's making it versus who's consuming it versus who's voting on it. And we wanted to make sure our membership was representative of our music community. And when I got here, it just wasn't. We didn't have enough people of color. We didn't have enough women. We didn't have certain representation in certain genres, dance community, rock community, country. So we needed to rebalance or tweak, or can't remember the word you use, which I like so much. Fiddle. We needed to fiddle with the membership. We need to fiddle with it and make sure that it was.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the other way is to change the awards themselves, right? Which I'll come to. I think we can pursue that on two tracks. But we're going to change who's voting is one way to change them. Did you actively think, okay, we're getting to some of the wrong answers in who wins these awards? We got to change the membership.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That voting body, right? That's the thing you turned over. That's this year's big project you announced the change you just said earlier, you requalified 100% of the members. That's one way to change the outcome, right? Is to change the voters.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. And I hear them loud and clear, I would love her to win album of the ear. I would also love a bunch of other people to win album of the year. I think there's great music. I think it's also subjective. Beyonce obviously has a ton of very loyal and supportive fans, which I don't blame them for Beyonce's won a ton of Grammy Awards. So we really respect her creativity and her artistries. There's no question about that as a voting body. There's different things that happen throughout the year that the voters sometimes resonate with in certain categories and other categories. It doesn't resonate. So it's really hard to predict. I am excited for this year because there's been so many amazing records. There's been great work by some amazing artists. So I'm very optimistic for this year. As far as who wins what and who gets snubbed and who's happy and who's mad. I mean, I can't predict that, but what I can predict is the voters will do their very best to listen to the music, to evaluate the music. The other thing I can say is we also have a very different voting body now than we had three years ago than we had five years ago than we had 10 years ago.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A different type of participation or attention from the artist community because it's a very desired thing to have your peers tell you you've done something special in that year I think is meaningful. So there's an extra gravitas or weight to the grammars, which I think translates to the viewers.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It can be contentious, it can be controversial, but for us, and I'll say for me personally, what I love about it is there's no other award like it because it's not about popularity. It's not about who got the most streams or who had the most likes. It's truly about the people that are in the industry and who are working day in and day out around music, listening to the records or songs or albums and they're deciding which one they think is the best. And it's subjective and we know that. There's no, it's not a basketball game. It's all up to the interpretation of the listener. But what makes our show valuable and as of now, maybe this isn't always going to be the case, but as of now, the most valuable television show in regards to music is because it's not just about popularity. It's not predictable. It's about the voters giving the award for the year to the artists or music that they love. And it also attracts...”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's constant fiddling, and that process happens a couple times a year through our process of submitting proposals, and then they go into the trusty room. We vote, our staff adopts them, and they take place next year on the show.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is evolving so rapidly that we had to evolve as an organization. So I spent a lot of time thinking, how can we adjust? How can we pivot? How can we see around the corner what's happening next? So a lot of that work, I have to say, comes from our membership because the membership really submits the changes. They submit proposals. What are we going to honor in music this year? How are we going to title this new category? What type of, what's the nomenclature behind this genre of music? And the reason it's so important is that the members are the ones that know. They know better than I do. They know better than a lot of the staff who's our members are music professionals. So they might hear something in the new genre that's coming up and be like, oh, you guys aren't catching on. We have to honor this music. And that's how we continue to perpetuate the excellence in music so we can showcase different things. So it's constant, did you call it tweaking or you fiddling with constant fiddling?”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about it constantly to tell you the truth. And fiddling is a nicer way of or maybe a more playful way of saying it, but it's really the evolution of. What we do in iteration around everything at the academy. And that has been a big area of focus for me and my management team over the last four years because we are 66 years old. It is an iconic institution, if I could say so, and it means a lot to a lot of people, including people in the music community, but also music fans. So we want to be respectful of what that is and what it has been. But for me, we cannot afford to be stagnant. Music moves so fast. And you and your viewers, listeners know technology.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Membership overhaul 100% of our members have been requalified. We have 66% of our members are all new within the last five years. We've just added 3,000 new women voters. We've got almost 40% people of color. Those are not the numbers that we had four years ago. So we're all very proud as a staff and our elected leadership to the work that's been done to change our membership, which then, of course, changes the awards, changes our show, changes our ability to generate revenue.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a seasonal effort. That's something that we do. It's a six month focus. I mean, we're always thinking about the show. We're really directing a lot of our efforts towards the outcomes that will happen on the show. But the show production is very specific to a few months of the year. The rest of the year, the team's working on awards, on membership, on advocacy, on all the things that I talked about throughout the academy. And we have a great staff of DEI department. We have human people in culture. There's a lot of different departments that are focused on making sure that the academy can have that impact, making sure we are growing the right membership. And we talk about the awards and our ability to monetize our intellectual property, our Grammys through a show. We have to have the right awards. So you got to have the right awards department thinking about that. You 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, you have to have relevant members. So we've just gone through a”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It kind of fluctuates, but the majority of the people work for the recording academy, approximately 200 people for the academy, and then some split between the Latin Academy, the museum, and music cares.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the staff side, roughly 300 people between our different affiliates. As I said, it's the academy, it's the Latin Academy, the museum, and music cares.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's one of my big goals for my time here at the academy is to make sure that we're not so reliant on just TV. Having said that, we are exploring a lot of different opportunities how to best utilize the brand while still supporting music people and doing things within our mission. We don't want to just go sell coffee mugs or just do different random things. We want to make sure it's on brand, on mission. It's most coveted award because it's our peers voting for our peers. So we want to make sure we keep that in mind. And it's got to be a part of whatever we do to expand it. And I would love to talk about misalignment. I would love to find an additional way to generate a bunch of money and resources that we could use for our community. But right now, our deal with CBS is the thing that moves the needle the most for us and allows us to have the maximum impact within our community.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I spend a lot of time and energy, and we've got to do a better job of this as an academy, letting creatives and artists and producers know the reason that this show is so important is because it creates a bunch of money. I hate to be so crass, but it's a cash that we can use and deploy it back into our music community. So the better the show is, the better the ratings are, the more money we can generate from that show, more money that comes directly back into our industry.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, actually, it strikes me as being incredibly aligned because the idea of the show is to benefit creators, even just on its face, the show itself, we know the economic impact the show has to creators, songwriters, producers, engineers, all the ancillary or tangentially connected people that work in our industry all get a lift from our show. The streaming goes up, the consumption goes up, the ability to tour goes up. So that helps the creative community. And then all the revenue that we create, and you said most of the revenue is what we put, all of the revenue that we put into it comes from that show. The major drivers for revenue for the academy are the show, other Grammy Week activities, Ticket Sales, and sponsorships, which really kind of happens during Grammy Week. So all that money goes back into serving the community. So for me, the only thing that's a little bit misaligned is the lack of information that the creative community has about why we do the show and that we even do these other things. A lot of people just think, oh, the Grammys are just the show.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't have to be a member, but if you're professional, working in the music industry and you need help, if you are sick, facing a drug addiction, a mental health crisis, if you crash your car, someone broke in and stole your guitar. These are things that music cares, takes care of. And again, millions and millions of dollars every year during COVID, we give $50 million in aid to music people that needed help. And then we do a lot through our museum, education and preservation of music, making sure the next generation of kids is exposed to music. And if I didn't have an instrument in my hand or didn't know about all the different genres of music, I wouldn't have had a career. So making sure we do. And that's what is funded and financed by our show and our performance. So that's kind of the structure of the recording again.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it starts with our show, and most people know us from our show, the Grammy Show. We've been doing a Grammy Show for 66 years. I've been doing them since, as you said, four years ago as the CEO. But the Grammy Show celebrates music and lifts creators and showcases all the different genres of music. The recording academy that produces the Grammys generates revenue from that show. And we use that revenue that's paid to us by CBS for licensing fee to do all the programs we do throughout the year. So it's advocacy, you know, fighting for the rights of music people, talking about AI. We're doing a ton of stuff in that space. Make sure human creators protected, other copyright intellectual property protections that we're working on. We spend millions and millions of dollars every year advocating for the rights of music people. So that's one area. The other areas that philanthropic organization that's within the Academy called Music Cares. Music cares is kind of the give back organization for anybody who's a musician.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I feel like I might get like the readers might throw me off a ledge if every decoder is not AI. Or alternatively, 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 job as CEO since 2020. There was a big shakeup in the Recording Academy. There was lockdown, the music industry went into hibernation for a minute. We all did a lot of Zoom recordings. Now we're back into massive tours. There's a new era of stars emerging. Let's start with the very basics though. Tell people what the recording academy is and how it participates in the music industry.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Harvey Mason Jr., the CEO of the Recording Academy. Welcome to Dakoder. I'm excited to talk to you. As you might know, I'm obsessed with the music industry. I think paying attention to the music industry is the best way to predict what happens to every other creative industry five years from now. You obviously have a deep amount of insight into that. And then on top of that, we're talking a week before Grammy nominations come out. So I'm always interested in how that works, how you're thinking about that process at such an important part of the cultural calendar every year. And we got to talk about AI. There's just an infinite amount of AI.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, Harvey and I also talked about AI, which has posed to disrupt almost every creative industry and which has already caused major lawsuits and controversy in music. You'll hear Harvey explain that he's not a reflexive AI hater, and that he thinks there's a place for some of these tools in music production. In fact, he made the major decision to allow music made with AI to be eligible for the Grammys. But like so many other folks we've talked to, you'll hear him tout the irreplaceable, irrepressible benefits of human creativity, and you'll also hear him admit that he's nervous about it all and that sorting it all out is just going to be complex. I'll be honest with you, this is one of my favorite decoder conversations in a while. As you can probably tell, I love talking about the music industry. And Harvey was open to thinking through a lot of these issues out loud on the show. Okay, recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. Here we go.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Power of a company like Disney versus the wider distribution of something like YouTube We also talked about the Grammy Awards themselves, what the categories are, how the winners are chosen, and who those winners get to be. That's actually been Harvey's biggest project. The Academy just completely requalified its pool of voting members for the Grammys as part of a years-long effort to bring in younger voters and more women and people of color. At the same time, the Internet means the very idea of genre in music has been getting blurrier and blurrier for over a decade. I asked Harvey to define pop music, and you will hear him think through the answer. The Internet has also created massive fandoms in Stan culture, and I wanted to know how Harvey was thinking about that in the context of awards, which are supposed to be about recognizing art, not just popularity.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way it's worked for the past 50 years is that CBS pays a huge fee to the recording academy to broadcast the Grammys and the Recording Academy takes that money and uses it to fund things like music cares and lobbying for legislation that protects artists' rights. This isn't a secret. You'll hear Harvey lay it out bluntly and say that Grammys is where all the money comes from. This all worked great in an era where traditional TV networks had tons of money to spend and commanded a huge amount of attention because so many people watched traditional TV. With that era is over, and Harvey recently decided to move the Grammys to Disney starting in 2027, which will bring the show to ABCS, but also potentially to Disney Plus in Hulu. If you've been paying attention to the TV industry, live TV is increasingly driven by sports and award shows like The Grammys, so I wanted to know how Harvey was thinking about this deal, what the possibility of streaming distribution would mean for the show itself, and how much he thought the Grammys needed the prestige and branding.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Lapatelle, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Harvey Mason Jr. He's the CEO of the Recording Academy, the nonprofit organization that puts on the Grammy Awards, the most prestigious awards of music, and which runs the Music Cares Charity, which helps artists in need. Harvey is a fascinating guy. As a musician and producer, he's worked on projects with Destiny's child, Brittany Spears, Michael Jackson, Girls Generation, tons more, as well as produced the music in movies like Pitch Perfect and Straight Out of Compton. As CEO of the Academy, Harvey's had a lot of work to do since he started in January 2020. His predecessor was ousted after just five months in the role in a swirl of scandals, and the Grammys, along with the Emmys and the Oscars at that time, were facing a reckoning with massive race and gender inequality in the awards. On top of all that, the music industry itself came to a crashing halt. It's live concerts and awards.”
2024-11-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why the Grammys need to change, with CEO Harvey Mason Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT