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

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Upload a photo or voice notes and their AI-powered search helps diagnose the issue and match you with the right top-rated local pro. Instead of second-guessing or searching for hours, you get clarity and can hire the right pro with confidence. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. They know homes. Hire the right pro today. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Harvey Mason Jr., the CEO of the Recording Academy. That's the outfit that puts on the Grammy Awards. Let's talk to Harvey in 2024 when it was obvious that generative AI would upend the music industry, but not exactly clear how or how fast that would happen. Well, it's been 18 months since that conversation and you're going to hear Harvey say that AI is now, quote, omnipresent in music production. And Harvey knows what he's talking about. He is himself a legendary music producer who's worked with everyone from Michael Jackson to Beyonce. I've heard Harvey say 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. The streaming platform Deezer has reported that more than 50,000 AI-generated songs are being uploaded every day. And 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 what Harvey's experience is with all that looked like. And how he balances all that against 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. As you can tell, 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, whatever happens to the music industry happens to everything else five years later. And this conversation really highlights that. Okay, Harvey Mason Jr., the CEO of the Recording Academy on the future of AI and music. Here we go. Harvey Mason Jr. is songwriter, you're a producer, and you're 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're 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 questions. 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 CEO of the Recording Academy, that's the organization that puts on the Grammys. You run MusiCares, a charity. It's kind of 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 and 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 museum, the Grammy Museum, MusiCares, as you mentioned, our advocacy efforts in D.C. and state lawmakers 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 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, 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, the way things are new popularity comes up and 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 specifically part is growing? One of the things that really is going to affect a big change is our partnership with Disney ABC. We were at CBS for 50-something years. And so for the first time this year, we will be with Disney ABC. And that gives us the ability to do so much more. As you said, investing in content, storytelling. We have more opportunities for using our Grammy brand and to tell some music stories in different ways, documentaries, scripted, other forms of music content because Disney as our partner just 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 first strategy. So when we're doing events or we're doing 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 that 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 lightning round. But a big part of my decision-making is gathering information from people that I trust and people that are around me and people that 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 that give a lot of different insight and diverse perspectives and really special, 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 and do everything. So that has always been my style of leadership or decision-making. So you describe that structure on each eight group people around you, Recording Academy is about 300 people. Just how is that structured? How many people work for you and then how, what roles do they play in the large organization? So we have a president. We have a chief of strategy. 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 five, six years now that I've been in the role. And each of those department heads manages obviously a department, but they all kind of report up to me and 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. That's been a really, I've 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 I feel like if we rewind the clock five I feel all that pressure in the music industry. I can see all those gears turning and 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 and it's had an impact already, and I'm sure we're going to dive into it. We need to take a quick break, we'll be right back. Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI was supposed to handle the parts of the job you hate. Instead, it just describes them, suggests what to do about them and then leaves you to do it. That's not help, that's homework. ServiceNow's AI specialists are different. They're not a tool. Think of them as digital teammates who actually do the work from start to finish. 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And Cisco says that AI agents are now at that exact same inflection point. They can connect, but they can't think together. That's why Outshift by Cisco is building the internet of cognition. Its goal is to transform AI from isolated systems into orchestrated superintelligence by creating an open, interoperable infrastructure. Cisco says Outshift is enabling agents and humans to share intent, context, and reasoning. The cognitive evolution for agents is here. Explore the internet of cognition at outshift.com. That's outshift.com. Support for the show comes from Zapier. Everywhere you look, people are talking about AI, seemingly all the time. But when it gets down to business, endless talk doesn't get work done. If you want to break the hype cycle and put AI to work across your company, for real, then use Zapier. Zapier is how you actually deliver on your AI strategy. With their AI orchestration platform, you can bring the power of AI to any workflow, so you can do more of what matters. You can connect top AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to the tools your team already uses. Whether that's AI-powered workflows, an autonomous agent, a customer chatbot, or whatever else, you can orchestrate it all with Zapier. You don't need to be a tech expert to make it happen either. Zapier is for everyone. Their data shows teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier. Join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting Zapier.com slash Decoder. That's Z-A-P-I-E-R.com slash Decoder. 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 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, never mind romantic. 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 the industry should use it? It has, 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. 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 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 a producer and a songwriter. You're still a working producer and songwriter. You're still in sessions. You gave a quote in January. You said, I've seen AI in every studio and 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, 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. They want the second verse to have the same rhyme scheme and rhythm, and they'll just send in, 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 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 that have not put in the work or don't have the 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. You know, she's in 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. People 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 in my role as CEO. 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. 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 artist and I'll pitch it to them directly with their voice. And none of the artists should talk to it, but we heard it from all these songwriters. Yeah, we're just using the artist voices. Sure. 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 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 commercialized. I think there's an image and then 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. Well, 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. 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. And we acknowledge, and this is why it's a fine line, we're walking the tightrope 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. Or 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 what I see the future as, is navigating that. And I think it's going to evolve over time. Where's the line right now? Right now, we call it 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, this 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. So we just want to try and get it right. We want to try and celebrate music and music people in 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. I know you've been advocating for a 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 an AI record. Make a sound 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? Like, what's the proof? Well, 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. 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 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 to 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've had about 24,000 submissions last year. And that'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 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. There are other parts of the industry that are attempting to do the same things. Spotify, for example, wants to change the royalty structure 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. And I also think that's going to evolve over time. And as we start 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% generated, what is 0% generated? And at some point, the 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. We'll be more concerned about it, but maybe we'll be less. And it'll be like drum machines. And you'll say, some AI was used in this recording, but do I care? And 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 auto-tune on it. They're not thinking about if the strings are real strings in the ballad that they just listened to and that they love. 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 auto-tune, right? Like Cher's producers lied about using auto-tune on Believe, right? 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 it got 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. It's 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 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, they know it's bad, but they're like, hold on, we got to do, we have war. 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 Yudio and others. So the dialogues are ongoing. And 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 I think what you say needs to be 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, 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. And it's a dynamic that is very difficult, and I don't know that we've 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. 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 and 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. And 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 Vandross. And I remember distinctly when they've passed and thinking to myself, we've lost something so important and so meaningful. And 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. 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. 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 Altman? That's the vibe I get on this show all the time. These guys, 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. 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. 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? And 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. So 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, is I guess the challenge. 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 the Wall Street Journal, about not being on Spotify at that time. Universal Music exists. That is maybe the biggest bulldozer of all. Sir Lucian. Sir Lucian 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. 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 pirate. At least 50. But 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, those 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. I want to ask one more question here, and I'm going 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, I'm just kidding. I was going to say. That's the breaking news. No, no, no, I have. 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 this fail. Not I'm going to make SoulCovers of 50 Cent. Right? There's something about that that's just kind of cheap. 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 another track. So when 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. So 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 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, and I think we do that at the Grammys. 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 about music people in other parts of the world. And, of course, our show is going to be the highlight, music's biggest night. And so that's this year, February, coming up. It's going to be exciting, our first show on Disney ABC. A lot of the young audience lives on what you would call social video platforms. They're on TikTok or Instagram Reels. Are you going to try to address them there more, or are you going to let the industry handle it? 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 using all the different avenues and outlets to make sure we're sharing our content, sharing our story, sharing music with people. And we've seen a little bit of a decline around linear from our show. We've gone and 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. 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. 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. TikTok is something that has proven to bring a lot of eyeballs and ears to the table. All right. Last question. It's the toughest one of all. I'm going to let you get out of here. Why didn't Sabrina Carpenter win at the Grammys this year? Because our voters didn't vote for it this year. That's a tough one. 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. Our 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 deserved to win, the voters dictate who gets that trophy. 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. Yep. 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 decoder at theverge.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. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram. And they're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review. 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, and 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. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. 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