Harvey Mason Jr.

Zero. That's a seasonal effort. That's something that we do. It's a six-month focus. I mean, we're always thinking about the show. We're really directing a lot of our efforts towards the outcomes that will happen on the show. But the show production is very specific to a few months of the year, the rest of the year.

The team's working on awards, on membership, on advocacy, on all the things that I talked about throughout the academy. And we have a great staff of DEI department. We have people in culture. There's a lot of different departments that are focused on making sure that the academy can have that impact, making sure we are successful.

growing the right membership and we talk about the awards and our ability to monetize our intellectual property our grammys through a show we have to have the right awards so you got to have the right awards department thinking about that you got to have the right membership department because without the right members you're not going to get the right results in order to stay relevant we have to have relevant members so we've just gone through a membership overhaul 100 of our members have been requalified we have 66 of our members are all new within the last five years

And we've just added 3,000 new women voters. We've got almost 40% people of culture or people of color. I'm sorry. Those are not the numbers that we had four years ago. So we're all very proud as a staff and our elected leadership as to the work that's been done to change our membership, which then, of course, changes the awards, changes our show, changes our ability to generate revenue.

I think about it constantly, to tell you the truth. And fiddling is a nicer way of, or maybe a more playful way of saying it, but it's really the evolution of what we do in iteration around everything at the academy. And that has been a big area of focus for me and my management team over the last four years, because we are 66 years old is an iconic institution, if I could say so.

And it means a lot to a lot of people, including people in the music community, but also music fans. So we want to be respectful of what that is and what it has been. But for me, we cannot afford to be stagnant. Music moves so fast. And you and your viewers, listeners know technology and the way people are consuming music and art is evolving so rapidly that we had to evolve as an organization. So

I spend a lot of time thinking, how can we adjust? How can we pivot? How can we see around the corner what's happening next? So a lot of that work, I have to say, comes from our membership because the membership really submits the changes. They submit proposals. What are we going to honor in music this year? How are we going to title this new category?

What's the nomenclature behind this genre of music? And the reason it's so important is that the members are the ones that know. They know better than I do. They know better than a lot of the staff because our members are music professionals. So they might hear something in the new genre that's coming up and be like, oh, you guys aren't catching on. We have to honor this music.

And that's how we continue to perpetuate the excellence in music so we can showcase different things. So it's constant, did you call it tweaking or fiddling? It's constant fiddling. Tweaking is nicer than fiddling. No, it's constant fiddling. And that process happens a couple times a year through our process of submitting proposals. And then they go into the trustee room. We vote.

Our staff adopts them, and they take place next year on the show.

Balance is nice. It's a collision sometimes. It is truly... It can be contentious. It can be controversial. But for us, and I'll say for me personally, what I love about it is there's no other award like it because it's not about popularity. It's not about who got the most streams or who had the most likes. It's truly about the people that are...

in the industry and who are working day in and day out around music, listening to the records or songs or albums, and then deciding which one they think is the best. It's subjective and we know that. It's not a basketball game. It's all up to the interpretation of the listener.

But what makes our show valuable, and as of now, and maybe this isn't always going to be the case, but as of now, the most valuable television show in regards to music is because it's not just about popularity. It's not predictable. It's about the voters giving attention. the award for the year to the artists or music that they love.

And it also attracts a different type of participation or attention from the artist community because it's a very desired thing to have your peers tell you you've done something special in that year, I think is meaningful. So there's an extra gravitas or weight to the Grammys, which I think translates to the viewers.

Sure. And I hear them loud and clear. I would love her to win Album of the Year. I would also love a bunch of other people to win Album of the Year. I think there's great music. I think it's also subjective. Beyonce obviously has a ton of very loyal and supportive fans, which I don't blame them for. Beyonce's won a ton of Grammy awards, so we really respect her. creativity and her artistry.

There's no question about that as a voting body. There's different things that happen throughout the year that the voters sometimes resonate with in certain categories and other categories it doesn't resonate. So it's really hard to predict. I am excited for this year because there's been so many amazing records. There's been great work by some amazing artists. So I'm very optimistic for this year.

As far as who wins what and who gets snubbed, who's happy and who's mad. I mean, I can't predict that, but what I can predict is The voters will do their very best to listen to the music, to evaluate the music. The other thing I can say is we also have a very different voting body now than we had three years ago, than we had five years ago, than we had 10 years ago.

The only way.

It didn't come so much from the answers. Yeah. Maybe personally it did. I'll back that up. But what it really stemmed from was looking at the makeup of our voting body and then looking at the makeup of music creators and who's making it versus who's consuming it versus who's voting on it. And we wanted to make sure our membership was representative of our music community.

And when I got here, it just wasn't. We didn't have enough people of color. We didn't have enough women. We didn't have certain representation in certain genres in dance communities. Rock community, country. So we needed to rebalance or tweak or can't remember the word you use, which I like so much. Fiddle. We needed to fiddle with the membership.