Grammys CEO on AI's omnipresence in music and industry disruption
· Nilay Patel
Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy and a legendary producer who has worked with everyone from Janet Jackson to Beyoncé, sat down for a conversation about where AI…
Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy and a legendary producer who has worked with everyone from Janet Jackson to Beyoncé, sat down for a conversation about where AI stands in music 18 months after his last appearance. His take is blunt: AI is now “omnipresent” in music production. Mason says he cannot remember a single session or song he has been around recently that didn't use some form of AI, from generating chord progressions and drum loops to writing lyrics and creating background vocals.
The quality has improved dramatically. A year and a half ago, you could tell when something was AI generated. Now, Mason says, people play him things made by AI and he is genuinely impressed. That poses a real challenge for the Recording Academy, which represents about 30,000 music creators. The Grammys have rules requiring “more than a de minimis amount of human creativity” for eligibility, but verifying that is fuzzy. Mason admits the system is not perfect and relies on honor and screening committees rather than any technical detection tool.
Mason is optimistic about human creativity winning out, but he acknowledges the tension. Big artists like Diplo and Timbaland are openly using AI, while younger fans in polls say they dislike it. The industry has something of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Mason thinks we are still in the early 1.0 version of AI in music, and that the truly innovative uses, like using AI stems to inspire live musicians to build something new, have not fully emerged yet.
On the business side, Mason also discussed the Grammys move to Disney after 50 years on CBS, which he says is about expanding globally and telling more human stories about music people. And he addressed the broader industry pressure, from “blue dot fever” around ticket sales to the sheer volume of AI songs flooding platforms like Deezer, which reports more than 50,000 AI generated uploads per day. The bottom line: the music industry is moving fast, and the Academy is trying to keep its guardrails relevant without stifling the next creative leap.