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

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19:50Nilay Patel:we're back with recording academy ceo harvey mason jr ready to dive into how ai is changing the music industry so the last time you're 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 never mind or ilmatic and then you said it's all gonna be a mess until we get it sorted out because yes it's difficult So it's been 18 months. Has your thinking evolved dramatically on how AI can deliver quality and how you 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.

20:25But 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 and i'm impressed at the quality of it and all that scares me because i do represent our 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. And now you can prompt some of that stuff.

21:06And 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.

21:13Nilay Patel:You're a producer and a songwriter. 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 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 interest of all the songwriters.

21:46So the quote, let me address that first of all, because I work in pop music generally, pop R &B. And in those genres of music, I think it's pretty omnipresent. There's 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.

22:22They 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 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 I have mixed emotions. I am definitely disturbed by the fact that I worked my whole entire life.

23:00And 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 that 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 talk 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 sixth grade. And so it's definitely, it's a challenge for me, but I also have to understand both in my role as a producer and my role as a CEO, there's got to be a balance because AI is here.

23:41People are going to use it. There's competition out there. songwriters artists producers they're all competing for a certain amount 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, my role as CEO.

24:13Nilay Patel:You mentioned genres. 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. 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, right? And 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 artists and I'll pitch it to them directly with their voice.

24:41Nilay Patel: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, right? That is spreading to other parts of the music industry. Pop music, as you mentioned, it's starting to use it, but it's not as structured. It's not as controlled. How do you see that diffusion happening across genre? 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, you know, AI or any input from it. Oh, I have a very different view of country music and how commercial.

25:12Yeah.

25:13Nilay Patel:I think there's an image and I think there's an industry. A reality. Yeah. Well, I've definitely witnessed some people in that space using AI. 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 and violins and violas and cellos and basses, and it splits it out on a score.

25:50And then they'll just hire the orchestras to play it, but they will not have to do any of the arranging or the composing or even making charts. It's doing all that for you. So you're going to see it used different ways in different forms of music making, which you're already seeing, as you said, in country versus pop versus composing.

26:07Nilay Patel:I'm going to read you some stats that I think are just fascinating. The Hollywood Reporter just did a big AI and music poll. This is from last fall, but it tracks with the polling that we've seen more recently. Most people, 52%, do not want to listen to music made with the help of AI. 66 % 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 look at their website.

26:40As you get into younger people, I would imagine those numbers might change.

26:44Nilay Patel: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 like 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 that music industry has a quote, don't ask, don't tell policy about AI music. Suno CEO, it's one of the big generative AI platforms, maybe the dominant one.

27:14Nilay Patel:Mikey Shulman said 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. And 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?

28:00But acknowledging it's like Ozempic, some people are going to tell you they're on it, some people are not. So 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, 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. And so we'll see what the perception is. And as people become more comfortable, you know, 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.

28:33And 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 or AutoTune or 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 again. In 18 months, we should talk again, and we'll see how people are feeling.

28:58Nilay Patel:You see the recent sort of social media discourse about whether death of AutoTune had 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 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. Timbaland is doing straight AI artists. He's got an entire record labeled for his AI artists. 50 Cent just loves posting memes with like soul covers of 50 Cent songs.

29:31Nilay Patel:Grimes exists. Taryn Southern is out there. What's your take on 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 or 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. Yeah. 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, they can create more things.

30:07And some are going to, you know, rebuff the whole idea of using technology like that to create. And I don't think you're going to find any one size fits all. And 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 is how do we express ourselves as a society, as humans, as interacting with each other and talking about that human experience. That's how we communicate. That's how we feel each other. That's how we come together. So I think that's always going to be important.

30:41The other thing that's going to be important is humans are going to create the coolest, newest stuff. I don't, AI, I don't think, 18 months we can talk again. And 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 and that lands and that 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. And then they're going to iterate on that. And they're going to probably add a little twist here.

31:10And they're going to mash some stuff together and come out with a new song or 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 this month we'll see um so you'll you'll have both you'll have people using ai and just creating a whole bunch of music and you have other people say i i want to do it my way i want to create through my experience and through my pain and through my my interactions and that'll be cool so you were talking earlier about how to win a

31:42Nilay Patel:grammy you got a certified that you made it with human 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 the 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 or they won't even be eligible for a Grammy for performance because AI is doing the performing.

32:17But 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. And we acknowledge, and this is why it's a fine line. We're walking the tight rope right now. 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.

32:50Or we're 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 really interesting and creative. Some of them seem egregious and too much. And 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 and our members and our creative community want because we listen to our creative community. So that's where I see the future is navigating that. And I think it's going to evolve over time.

33:20Nilay Patel:Where's the line right now? How much is too much? Right now, we call it a more than 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 no 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.

34:03So we're evaluating and trying to award something that means something different to everybody. So we just want to try and get it right. We want to try and celebrate music and music people and all the different forms of it. And we, at this point, are acknowledging that AI is a tool that is being used. We also, 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.

34:32Nilay Patel: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 to win a Grammy Award, you need to show us somehow 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? Well, we have screening committees that review and evaluate people's claims.

35:04And 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. 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's exactly proved 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.

35:43Maybe 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.

35:58Nilay Patel:I feel like we're having this deep conversation about the artistic process and creativity and vibes, and I'm just hitting you with 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.

36:32And 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 and AI becomes an issue for us and we can't determine what's happening and 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.

37:00Nilay Patel: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. And I know a lot of us are talking amongst ourselves about how can we align and how can we build some of those processes and lanes for separation. I also think that's going to evolve over time. And as we start talking, it is a deep conversation, philosophical thought.

37:34At some point, is it as important to determine what is synthetic or AI generated and what is 50 % generated, what is 0 % 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. And then it leaves it to us on the back end to make sure we're protecting human creativity. I'm not sure 18 months from now, maybe we will. will be more concerned about it, but maybe will be less, and it'll be like drum machines. And you'll say, some AI was used in this recording, but do I care?

38:12And I care as the CEO of the Grammys, and I care 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.

38:45Nilay Patel:There was a time when people really cared about autotune, right? Like, sharers, producers lied about using autotune on Belief, right? Like, 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 hopped 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 is always going to be important.

39:17It's always going to be the most desirable and always be the thing that pushes the art form forward.

39:21Nilay Patel:I like your optimism. my pushback here is drum machines for the most part were not made by defense contractors like maybe Yamaha had some sort of defense contractor but like 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 like they're caught up in like government, like 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. And at least from my perspective, it seems like the interests of artists and creatives, authors are, they know it's bad, but they're like, hold on, we got to do, we have war.

40:09Nilay Patel:We're going to do war with the AI models. We're going to argue about cybersecurity. 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. 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. And we're doing a lot of talking and definitely the other platforms, Suno and Udeo and others. So the dialogues are ongoing. And from my perspective, or at least maybe I'm overly optimistic. I know I I probably am.

40:39You 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. But from what I can tell, they realize the importance of music and creativity. And nobody wants to append 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 and I know music people. I know how we think. I also know how competitive and talented that our music people are.

41:21And I'm just always sure that we'll persevere and we'll use the tools. We'll figure out cool new ways to do great new things with them. And we'll iterate on what we've done before and we'll come up with a new way of making music and expressing ourselves. So that's really where my optimism comes, less so from thinking that all the platforms are going to get in line and do exactly what we want because we know that's not going to happen. Or less so that we're going to have the perfect legislation that's going to be drafted and passed and approved this year because I know that's probably not going to happen.

41:53But I believe in our people.

41:55Nilay Patel:As you talk to all these companies, which of them seem the most artist-friendly? Which of them seem the most distant? How's the dynamic? When I'm in the room, they're all artist-friendly. They're all very nice and they all love creators. I'm just thinking about OpenAI doing Sora and just launching it in the world. We stole everything. Or I just keep picking on OpenAI doing Studio Ghibli. Or saying this voice from our voice synthesizer sounds suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson until there's a lawsuit. Some of them seem much more poised to be aggressive and some of them seem a little calmer. Some of them are more, they're just not as concerned about it and they're not focused on a little more frivolous with how they're treating the artist community.

42:40But maybe I'm misinterpreting it. It doesn't seem like they're doing it to be spiteful, to be harmful. They're all trying to figure this out at the same time. And I have heard some people say they just want to move fast and break things. You know, you've heard that probably more than I have. And they're going to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. And those are things that are scary from a creative community perspective. People that have written songs and hold copyrights and intellectual property, we never want to hear that. We'll ask for forgiveness later. We're going to use what you've created and what you own and what you legally have possession of.

43:18and we're going to use that for our own benefit. That's a dangerous precedent and one that I don't think anyone of us on the creative side would support. But you are seeing some of that. So that needs to be worked out.

43:34Nilay Patel:We need to take another short break. We'll be back in a minute.

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46:38Nilay Patel:We're back with Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. talking about the collision of AI in the music industry.

46:46Nilay Patel:There's an interesting split here. There's legislation that you've brought up, the No Fakes Act, which protects voice, image, and likeness. There's the Train Act, which would give creators access to the records of what was trained on so you could demand royalties. There's a clear act, which is just a transparency act. Just tell us what's in the models. I would love all those to exist. Like you said, I don't know if this year is the year for a Congress to act with alacrity on AI. I just got back from D.C. and it doesn't seem like this is the year. They're having so much infighting. But there is a lot of alignment around these, which surprised me.

47:20It's bipartisan, bicameral support for especially the no fakes. Everybody knows that's the right thing to do. And how can we get it done? Let's get the language right. Let's not try and make it perfect. Let's get something on the books right now and then we can refine it. That's at least my thought.

47:35Nilay Patel:You would think Donald Trump of all people would understand that the use of his voice is a powerful thing that he should – but it doesn't seem like it matters, right? Like there's – I have a – like my most nihilistic version of this is copyright law exists as a framework for big corporations to make deals. And for everyone else, it's just a free-for-all. We're just going to take stuff and remix it and Mark Cuban and Taylor Swift are doing any crypto ads and that's just the end of the – there's no holding back and maybe there will be some laws on whatever timeline there are laws. And in the meantime, you're going to get the platforms deciding that because copyright law is the structure by which they make deals, they got to do something.

48:11Nilay Patel:So YouTube has likeness detection now. That is just a private legal framework. They just made up some rules about likeness and you can sign up for it in just the way that Content ID works. on YouTube. They're like, we saw your face. You're selling shoes. Do you want us to take it down? And they'll take it down. That's a lot of platforms inventing a bunch of frameworks. Do you think that's going to be effective? Do you think there's something to learn there as you push Congress or other governments to do stuff? Or does that feel like just another kind of chaos for artists to deal with? It feels like a first step and it feels like something that is headed in the right direction because those are things that are attempting to protect the artists and the ownership that they have and i appreciate people trying to do that and but it does make it difficult for the artists having some federal framework some federal legislation or even an industry-wide framework that we could all abide by would be even better but everybody's just trying to figure this stuff out people are trying to run their businesses artists are trying to run their businesses streamers are trying to run their businesses uh and there's a lot it's a dynamic that is very difficult.

49:14And I don't know that we faced a time like this before. Everybody likes to say, we've seen this before, we've seen this before. And to some degree, that's true. We've seen sampling, we've seen streaming, we've seen, as I said, drum machines and disruptive technologies in the creative process. But this one, for some reason, feels different. And maybe I'm showing my age when I say that because everybody says that about the issues that are in their generation. but the change to the human creative process and the ownership of that is in question or at least being discussed right now and I don't think it's been as acute as it is now or has the potential to be now in the history of where we are in creativity and music.

50:00Nilay Patel:I don't sit in your shoes. I don't have to play the roles you have to play. I can just be direct. I look at the state of, I don't know, the world economy And I think those guys shouldn't be as rich as they are, and all of the artists should be much richer than they are. I totally agree. Let's go. Are you allowed to be that frustrated and express that as clearly as I think your fans, as your constituencies in the music community want you to say it? Yeah, I'd like to think so. I agree with artists and creators and people who make music are special. They just are. and what they do for society and what we do for the world, what we do for individuals, for communities, for countries.

50:39And I'm a music person, so I just see it through that lens. But I think that the people who do that should be taken care of and should be compensated, and they should have the ability to control what they make, and they should have the ability to decide how it's being used and how they're compensated and how they're credited. I just strongly believe that. In my career, I've worked with so many special people, And I remember, I've sadly worked on the last record of a lot of very talented people. I worked on Whitney Houston's last record, Michael Jackson's last record, Luther Venn. And I remember distinctly when they've passed and thinking to myself, we've lost something so important and so meaningful.

51:19And people have their challenges. They have struggles, issues. Everybody has something they can get upset at an artist about. But at the end of the day, when an artist makes a record and you feel that record and you're driving your car or you're dancing at a wedding or you're at a concert, there's nothing in the world like that. And those people and the people that allow that to happen, we have to watch out for them, regardless of some of their shortcomings or some of their faults because of what they put into the world. And I just think that's powerful.

51:47Nilay Patel:Are you allowed to bring this fire to your meeting with the AI companies? That's really what I'm asking here. For my audience, I sense frustration. Yeah. This is going to go out on YouTube and I invite you to take a scroll through the inevitable YouTube comments we're going to get, which basically come down to why isn't Harvey arresting Sam Wallman, right? Like that's the vibe I get on this show all the time. These guys are – they've stolen everything and the people who should be getting the value, the people who make us feel joy are getting nothing. That's how people felt about Spotify. That's increasingly how people feel about YouTube.

52:16Nilay Patel:Are you allowed to bring the fire to your meetings and in your advocacy or are you playing a more subtle game? I try and bring fire with me no matter where I go. All right. But also it is a relationship and it's a long-term play. This is not going to happen instantly. And how you're interacting with people is going to affect the outcome. And I do believe, as I said, they're trying to run a business just like I'm trying to run a business or protect a business. And finding a solution is not going to be me just bulldozing them. It's going to be how do we come together to find something that works for both of us.

52:49And I have to say, much like streaming, when streaming came out, people were up in arms about it. streaming is horrible, we're not getting paid. But on the other side of that, you see how many more people are listening to the music, you see how many more people are finding new artists that they never knew before, how many people are being encouraged to go to concerts because they discovered the song that they love on a streaming platform. So there are trade-offs. So if somebody goes and just blows up streaming right off the bat, we lose a lot of other opportunities that are unintended or you might not have thought of.

53:17So approaching the AI people is kind of the same thing. Yes, we have some issues, but yes, you're also bringing something that could potentially benefit all of us, music creators, society at large. And so how do you manage that as, I guess, the challenge?

53:31Nilay Patel:There are some bulldozers in the music industry. When streaming came out, Taylor Swift bulldozed her way into a rate structure that eventually most of the industry adopted. She put a big article, I think it was a Wall Street Journal, about not being on Spotify at that time. Universal music exists. That is maybe the biggest bulldozer of all. Sir Luthien. So, Huston Grange, one of the biggest bulldozers of all, he's suing and settling with Sunos and UDOs in very tactical ways. The fight is whether the songs in Suno can be exported as MP3 files to be shared freely or whether you have to listen to them on a platform, which provides at least some gatekeeping.

54:10Nilay Patel:I don't know if that's effective. I don't know if that's an effective restriction. I can think of 50 ways to get around that as an old college music. At least 50. But like this is the level that the bulldozers are saying, okay, we are going to restrict your platform. Do you think that that kind of power in the music industry can lead the charge on pushing back? Yes, it can. Will it be effective? We'll see. At some point, I'm sure they all realize this much more than I do because they're incredibly smart and powerful and thoughtful. But consumers want what consumers want. and friction between consumers and music or consumers and how they access their music.

54:50Those are things that you can push against as much as you would like to. And it's probably not going to work because people want to listen to their music. So yes, I think strong leadership and lawsuits and trying to be protective is important. And it is hopefully going to make advancements in the right direction. But at the end of the day, as I said, people want their music. They want to listen to it. And that's probably going to change based on a lot of things, the lawsuits, the bulldozers, but also fans of music.

55:23Nilay Patel:I want to ask one more question here, and then I want to talk about the Grammys and Disney for one second to wrap it up. You've been in the studios. You've seen artists use these tools in all kinds of ways. I'm assuming you've used the tools in all kinds of ways. What's the most innovative sound? I've never used the tools. You've never used the tools? No, just kidding. I was going to say. That's the breaking news. No, no, no. I'm sorry. What's the most innovative sound? What's the most innovative technique that you've seen the tools enable? Because that's the thing that to me would maybe make the sale.

55:49Nilay Patel:Not, I'm going to make soul covers of 50 cent. There's something about that that's just kind of cheap, right? But we're going to enable a new sound, a new method of songwriting that enables a new kind of story to be told. Where have you seen the bleeding edge? What I've seen interesting is people using the platform to create songs and generate stems. and stems are the multi-track split outs. So you have all the drums on one track, bass on track. So you say the platform, you mean like Suno? Yeah. And creating stems and then having live musicians iterate off of the stems. So they'll say, okay, here's a really cool groove of a song that we love, but now let's do a live drum, a live bass, live keyboard player, not using the stems from the platform, but having those inspire live musicians to build on top of that.

56:34So I think that's kind of cool because it's almost like you're having a writing partner in the room that has infinite ideas. And you can say, well, let me try it like this. And you hear something that inspires something in you as a musician or as a producer. To me, those are interesting uses. I like less people who just prompt and get a sound and just stick that in their song and say, oh, I got something from the platform. I'm going to use it. I like more when they get that and they hear it and it triggers something and you go to the next level from what you've just heard. And I think that's a cool use of it.

57:09Nilay Patel:Let me put that in a sort of broader arc of music. We've talked about drum machines a lot. I'm a Depeche Mode fan. Me too. They became a drum machine band because the drums are too loud in their apartment. So the drum machine enabled Depeche Mode and then synthesizers enabled all of like post-punk, first wave. That's my music. Like New Order exists because of a huge technological set of achievements that then they use to make a style of music. Turntables and mixers. We got first wave hip hop. Then we got samplers. We got another wave of hip hop, auto-tune. You got Akon. Whatever that is, right?

57:44Nilay Patel:T-Pain. Yeah, yeah. One of the most underrated and correctly rated artists of all time. Like at the same time, T-Pain. All right. Like I can point to here's a technological innovation that led to a sound, that led to a genre, that led to a movement. What do you think that looks like with AI? Is it going to be the same kind of thing or is it slop? Because the danger is slop. The danger is definitely slop. I don't think it's going to be one thing because AI is so all across the board and it's being used in so many different ways. The drum machine was a very specific example, whereas AI is you can't define its individual use.

58:18Everybody uses it differently. Every genre uses it. Now I'm finding out from you that even countries using it. So I don't think it's the same thing where you're going to say, oh, that's that AI sound. I don't see that happening.

58:30Nilay Patel:I think that to me, I look at all this data, all these feelings people have, and the whole industry can't point to the thing that they're delivering. We're going to ask for all the GPUs and all the power, water rights, and you can't buy a stick of RAM for a PC anymore. And you can't point to the one thing that you made that's worth it. You can point to everything. We're going to change everything. And that everything is almost too diffuse. And I'm sort of wondering, like, when – sure, Timbaland is going to do an AI artist, but I already know what that artist is going to sound like, and I already know how the audience is going to react to that.

59:02Nilay Patel:There's not a sound, right? There's not a K-pop of AI that's going to reorient the listener or the audience. Do you see anybody trying that, pushing on it? I don't know. I don't even know what that would look like. I don't know what the result of that is. I think that you're going to see new different uses of the technology and people are going to continue to push the boundaries when you talk about Timberland or Diplo or how they're using it that's I mean we're in 1.0 version of this and people are just getting used to seeing it in their toolbox and once people have access to it for a little while much like you saw the evolution of sampling and it used to just be take the song and just sing over the whole thing now it's take a piece and chop it and then flip it and then reverse it and then speed it up and pitch it down.

59:51So you're going to see new uses of this tool. And that's when you'll start to understand what its real power is.

59:58Nilay Patel:Let's end by talking about the Grammys a little bit. That's obviously the thing that the Recording Academy does is the thing that funds everything else. We started by talking about your decision-making process. You made a big decision. You're going to leave CBS. You're bringing it to Disney. It's going to stream across platforms. You talked about the content explosion that we're in for. Just walk me through that decision. Why make the change? We'd been at CBS for over 50 years. They've been great partners. They were going through some ownership changes, as you know. They were trying to figure out what their focus was going to be.

1:00:28And we also knew as a Grammy organization, we had expansive ideas and thoughts where we thought we could go as a brand. We wanted to be more international, more global. We wanted to reach more music people. You're seeing in music genres or borders and languages are breaking down. There's music from all different parts of the world, K-pop, Afrobeats, music from the Middle East, India, other areas, Latin, of course. We knew we needed to continue to grow our organization and our reach, and we felt Disney and ABC would be a great partner for that. It also really aligns with what they're doing as they're expanding into new areas and new territories.

1:01:07And they're a company that, I mean, I don't know about you, I've admired that company and the leadership over the last dozen years or more, how they've changed and how they've evolved, how they've kept up with technology, how they've always at the heart of that, though, been true to the artists, been true to storytellers, and they've been really passionate about making great things. So there was a lot of alignment for me personally and then also for our organization with Disney that just made logical sense.

1:01:34Nilay Patel:Was this a bidding war? Were they the biggest track or were they the biggest track and the best vibes? There were multiple people involved in wanting to be in the media rights business with us, which I'm very appreciative and thankful for. And I think that is a testament to the work that our organization has done, our board, our members, our staff and leadership over the last six years to get the organization to where we are, which was making sure we were relevant, making sure we were respected, making sure we were honoring music as accurately as we could. And so because of those things and our international opportunity and the availability of music in other parts of the world and our agency that we have to celebrate it, we were a desired property.

1:02:16And again, I'm fortunate for that. It was not about the biggest check for us, though. It was about making sure that we could further our mission, perpetuate the right narrative out into the music community, that we are here to serve music people, uplift music, because of what we talked about earlier, the importance of it and what I think music means to the world and to society. So Disney was a great partner because of that alignment. Yes, there was a financial component because, as you touched on, everything we do, our advocacy, our education, our music preservation, our legislation, all of our work around music cares, all that stuff is paid for by our media rights deal.

1:02:51So we have to get the right deal. And we are a not-for-profit. A lot of people don't know that. We're not doing this for profit. We get the money that comes in the door, and we push it back out into our music community to help music people. If you think about the LA wildfires, we did$30 million of relief to music people who lost their houses or their instruments or needed medical care. So those are the things that drive our decision, my decision when it comes to doing a new media rights deal.

1:03:14Nilay Patel:One of the things I think about with award shows in particular is they were very powerful in what you might call the monoculture era. Everyone has seen all the movies. Everyone has listened to the radio. Everyone has heard most of the songs. That is dwindling, right? Everyone's in a little filter bubble on whatever algorithmic platform listening to whatever TikTok hit the labels have paid to make big today. That's making the award show a more diffuse product, right? I can watch the Grammys and I haven't heard of half the artists. How do you solve that problem? Because the value of the award show needs to stay high to fund all the other stuff.

1:03:47Well, as we touched on earlier, I still believe in live programming and live events. And that is going to be a premium offering. People want to see things that are timely that you can't record and watch later because there's that social element of it. Did you see what happened on this stage or did you see who won this? So that's, to me, an advantage that we have that's similar to sports. When you watch a sporting event, you want to watch it in real time because you want to see who won and who played well or what were the stories. So I hope and I believe truly that that is an advantage for an awards show if done right.

1:04:19As far as the diffusion and the different genres, if we can make the show compelling and we can continue to tell human stories, which I think we've done over the last few years and our production partner, Fullwell and Ben Winston have been instrumental in this, you bring audiences to the show because they're compelled to watch the stories and the human interest elements. And we're looking to expand that with our partnership with Disney. I think that's an important component of it because it's not just about what song you love. It's about the process. It's about who are the people that are making those songs and then to see it displayed in a way that nobody else can do.

1:04:56And I think we do that at the Grammys.

1:04:57Nilay Patel:So we should expect more. I know you produced the Michael Jackson documentary. We should expect more music biopics with Disney, more short form artists, human interest stories with Disney. I'd like to think so. I'd like to think that we are partnered with, I think, the best storytellers around. And using that platform and their expertise and knowledge and research and appetite for more music content is something that we are excited about. and we want to tell more stories about music people because to me they're timely and they're compelling and it's what we need more of right now so our hope is that grammy studios will continue to evolve and grow produce more content around things that we're doing shows in other parts of the world tell stories to tell start tell stories about music people in other parts of the world and of course our show is going to be the highlight that's you know music's biggest night and so that's this year February coming up it's going to be exciting our first show in on Disney ABC a lot of the young audience lives on what you would call social video platforms they're on tick-tock or Instagram reels are you gonna try to address them there more you know what the industry handle that no absolutely we want to be where music fans are and where people who are excited to watch music want to consume it that's one of the exciting parts about our partnership with Disney Plus and ABC they are very open to making sure we're We're using all the different avenues and outlets to make sure we're sharing our content, sharing our story, sharing music with people.

1:06:22And we've seen some of the, a little bit of a decline around linear from our show. We've kind of gone up and down. We creeped our way back up to a pretty good number. But what we've also seen and experienced is a massive explosion of consumption in other mediums on the digital side, on our website, on YouTube, on the platforms. So obviously consumers are changing and how people are watching are changing. And our hope is that we can keep up with that, especially now in our new partnership.

1:06:49Nilay Patel:Is TikTok still a place where all new music gets broken? A lot of it. Definitely. I won't say all, but it's a massive influencer and it's a huge platform for music people. And I see a lot of people spending a lot of time and energy trying to figure out that strategy. How do we use it? How do we leverage that platform to get attention and eyeballs? And you touched on it earlier. It's an attention economy. I mean, there's so many things coming out. I hear 75 ,000, you said 50 ,000 AI songs a day, and then another 100 ,000 songs on Spotify that are coming out. So there's so much competition for attention.

1:07:22And TikTok is something that is proven to bring a lot of eyeballs and ears to the table.

1:07:27Nilay Patel:All right, last question. It's the toughest one of all. And I'm going to let you get out of here. Why didn't Sabrina Carpenter win any Grammys this year? Because our voters didn't vote for her this year. It's a tough one. You know, I love Sabrina. She had a great record, but the answer to your question is very simple. It's always about the voters. And there's quite often music that is incredible, that is amazing and so exciting that doesn't win. And we have eight nominees and seven of them lose, sadly. It's subjective. It's challenging. But the good thing that I'm proud to say is it comes down to the voters and who they vote for.

1:08:07Our process has evolved over the time that I've been here. We've removed some steps. There was committees that used to be involved. There was other things that would help determine the nominees and the winners. Now it's a straight vote. How they vote is how you see the results coming out on television. So as much as Sabrina deserved to win and many other artists deserve to win, the voters dictate who gets that trophy.

1:08:30Nilay Patel:All right, Harvey. Well, I hope you keep that process as human as possible for as long as possible. It seems important. Very important. Thank you. Thank you so much for being on Decoder. This is always a pleasure, man. Yeah. I'd like to thank Harvey Mason Jr. for taking the time to speak with me. And thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube.

1:08:55Nilay Patel:You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe over to your podcast. If you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review. The Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat. It's edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.