Harvey Mason Jr.

We needed to fiddle with it and make sure that it was aligning with not just the world. But more importantly and specifically with music and the music community, the genres, we had to look at the genres. What genres are really popular? Do we have enough members in those genres to evaluate it accurately?

What are the new genres coming up that we want to make sure that we're able to interpret and vote for and get good outcomes? Well, then if that's a new one, we got to make sure we have members to support that. Otherwise, having a new category with nobody that can understand the nuance or the fine points of that genre voting, it's a failed concept.

And so we want to make sure that the voters align with music and how it's being made and consumed.

We still have room to grow, no question. We're where our goals were. We set those goals pretty aggressively. We met them a bit early, actually. But they'll continue to be new stretch goals and new things that I want to accomplish with our membership. And our membership team is amazing. They're so proactive.

And we have great committees around our membership team and elected leadership who are really passionate about membership. And as we said, until I hear your ideas for now, that's the way we think we can affect change in the outcomes and affect the relevance of our awards and continue to grow the Grammy brand on a global, global basis.

Well, I'd love to hear your thoughts more. When you talk about hard lines, the goal for the genre awards is to try and find some guardrails in which to fit music. And that's very hard. You're talking about, again, art and then someone's interpretation of art and how to couple those in the different buckets so that people can evaluate them comparatively.

So we don't want to see hip-hop going against rock because they're so dissimilar. Dissimilar audiences, I think. Dissimilar...

people that are creating, but as music becomes more and more, uh, you know, blurred together or mashed up, I guess I'll say there will be some conversations around how we're going to title the words, how we're going to include them in different fields and who should be voting on them. Right now we have different fields.

So you have, you know, a rock field, none of that will be a bunch of different genres of rock. Then you'll have a hip-hop field and a classical field. The way our voting works is we encourage our voters to vote in three fields. You don't want somebody who doesn't know anything about country just going into that category because their favorite artist is over there or

Vice versa, you don't need someone voting in classical that only knows one classical artist. So the way we try and do it is have qualified voters voting for the music that they like. Now, to your point, as music changes and genre walls come down, we'll be able to open that up a little bit more. But that is, again, something that will be determined by our professional music community.

Our members will say, hey, Harvey, you know what? Membership team at the Academy, you know what? We think rock and jazz sound like it's coming together. Let's put that in one category. And when that happens, because our members are telling us these things, it will happen and that will change the way we vote.

Pop music in 2024, there's a definition.

Pop music is a bit amorphous because it changes from year to year and it has something to do with the term and the title itself, pop, popular. And it's the genre that tends to have The choruses, the sing-along melodies, the right style of production and vocalists. It's very difficult because there are a lot of records that get lumped into pop. As a creator, I can create it.

I can show you on a piano and I can sing it, but it is a hard definition to nail down. The voters tend to do a really good job of that and making sure that they're voting for music they feel should be in that category. And also the way our labels and artists and independent labels submit, they submit their music where they want it to be.

And so if somebody feels like, hey, this is a pop record, it'll go into pop. And for the most part, that's where it's evaluated.

They land by saying our members will tell us when it's time. And the members, again, are professionals. They're all the people working in studios, on tours, Engineers, writers, producers, artists, singers, they're the professionals. And when they say, you know what, we're tired of genres or we're tired of separating people and putting them in boxes, then we'll evolve.

I can promise you that because our organization has never moved faster, has never been more fluid. We've never listened closer to our members or our music community. So when that starts to happen, we will make sure that things adjust.

Yes, and – What tends to need to happen is, again, the voters need to have an expertise in the genre. So if we had enough voters that knew exactly what was going on in the drill genre of music, then they would pop up and say, guys, we're missing a whole group of music here. We need to honor it. We would create the category. We'd go up in the next show and they would then vote.

But without that movement, without the momentum behind the genre that's sustainable, that translates into members, we would be popping new genres into the show without the support and kind of the underpinning that it needs to be relevant and to be accurate. Because if we put a drill category in now and we didn't have enough voters and we had the wrong outcomes because...

Just some random people started voting. Oh, I know this name. Let me vote for them. It would be disrespectful to the creators in that genre. It would also be, I think, detrimental to the brand of the Academy and the Grammys. So when the time is right for those new genres, I like to think that they'll be there. We just added the best African performance.