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The Recording Academy has promoted Adam Roth to executive vp of global partnerships & business development. Roth will be responsible for growing the Recording Academy’s global footprint through the negotiation and development of integrated partnership programs with both globally recognized brands and local on-the-ground sponsors. Roth previously served as svp of partnerships & business development […]
Ten recordings were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame on Wednesday (March 20), following a two-year period in which the Hall was put on hiatus for a reevaluation. As before, this year’s choices are eclectic and wide-ranging, including several that played a key role in creating or popularizing sub-genres – Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (neo-soul), Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” (EDM) and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (alternative hip-hop).
Several changes were made during the hiatus period. The number of inducted recordings is down significantly from 25 to 30 in prior years. And while past classes have included repeat inductions by such Hall of Fame mainstays as The Beatles and Ella Fitzgerald, all of this year’s choices are by first-time inductees into the Hall.
Also, the inducted recordings will be greeted with more fanfare than in the past, when each class was merely announced via press release. This class will be saluted at the Grammy Museum’s inaugural Grammy Hall of Fame Gala and concert on May 21 at the NOVO Theater in Los Angeles. Significantly, the event was scheduled more than three months after the Feb. 4 Grammys to give it its own moment.
This year’s induction class consists of six singles and four albums. All four albums were the artists’ debut studio albums (or solo debut, in Hill’s case). The three other debut albums honored were Buena Vista Social Club’s eponymous album, Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction and 3 Feet High and Rising. (Remarkably, Hill has not yet released a follow-up studio album, and Buena Vista Social Club disbanded without doing so.)
The inductees vary widely in terms of their commercial success. The list includes two Diamond-certified albums – Appetite for Destruction (18 million) and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (10 million). But it also includes a single, William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” that peaked at a lowly No. 95 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Some of this year’s inducted recordings were showered with Grammy Awards at the time, including Hill’s album of the year winner The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and The Doobie Brothers’ record and song of the year winner “What a Fool Believes.” But many others weren’t even nominated when they were eligible, including Appetite for Destruction and “I Feel Love.”
The Grammy Hall of Fame was created in 1973 to honor recordings that were released prior to the inception of the Grammy Awards in 1958. Eligibility was soon changed to allow any recording released at least 25 years ago. Counting this year’s 10 inductees, it includes 1,152 recordings.
Let’s take a closer look at the 10 recordings being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame this year. The titles are arranged alphabetically by artist.
William Bell, “You Don’t Miss Your Water”
Harvey Mason jr. is having a very good month. On Feb. 4, as Recording Academy CEO, Mason oversaw the 66th annual Grammy Awards, which were well-received by critics and saw an uptick in ratings.
Ten days later, wearing his other hat, as a long-time music supervisor for film and TV, Mason saw the release of the film Bob Marley: One Love, on which he is credited as executive music producer, and for which he recorded and mixed the songs. The film has been No. 1 at the box office in its first two weeks, and is already one of the top 10 highest-grossing music biopics in history.
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Bob Marley, who died in 1981, has long been one of Mason’s favorites. “I grew up listening to his music,” Mason says. “When I was in college, he was probably one of my top five most played CDs. I loved his music, so the chance to work on this project, even though it was a big one, was something I talked a lot about, thought a lot about and ultimately decided it was something I couldn’t pass up.”
The film includes a generous amount of Marley music as well as other music from the period, such as punk and disco (the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing”). “It was a fruitful time in music, for sure,” Mason says. “The filmmakers [led by director Reinaldo Marcus Green] did an excellent job of showcasing everything that was happening around different genres and the music and the culture at that period.”
When Mason signed on as Recording Academy CEO, he insisted on being able to continue his outside music projects on his own time. He believes it makes him a better CEO. “Being involved in music and getting a chance to create and have that outlet is a huge value to me as an executive,” he says. “That’s my life – making things and creating, collaborating.
“Each feeds the other,” he continues. “I really think there’s a value in doing both.”
Mason, who became interim president and CEO on Jan. 16, 2020 and assumed the role of permanent CEO on May 13, 2021, is a master at compartmentalizing. “I do Academy business 18 hours a day and then I get a meal and get back to the studio at night and create until I fall asleep. … I’m giving a ton of focus to the Academy, but fortunately I’m able to still be creative. For me, that was really part of being able to do this role at the Academy – could I stay creative? Could I remain connected to music and working with artists, songwriters and producers? I thought it was very important for me to continue doing that.”
Mason quickly adds, “It’s also something that the search committee and the executive committee felt was a good thing. It wasn’t something that I had to negotiate. They said, ‘We love that you’re a creator; that you do this work and you’re still involved in creating music. We’ve never had a CEO like that.’”
Mason doesn’t have to clear each outside music project with the trustees, but stresses, “I think there’s a mutual understanding that I wouldn’t want to do something that takes away from my job at the Academy. But also, the Academy understands the value in having a creator in this position. So, there’s not a formalized process, but I’m very respectful of my role and my obligations that I’ve made to not just the board but also the music community.”
Before he became CEO, Mason received five Grammy nominations – three of them for his work in film and TV, on the soundtracks to Dreamgirls, Pitch Perfect 2 and Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert.
But he has taken himself out of Grammy contention as long as he is CEO. “I’ve committed to not putting my name on the ballot because I wouldn’t want my job at the Academy to influence how somebody viewed a project or voted for a project.”
But other people who work on those projects can submit their own names. “I don’t want to punish people that do great work. So, others can submit, I won’t submit and I will not be getting a nomination or win while I’m in this role.”
Mason has a different view about Recording Academy trustees competing for Grammys. This year, three current trustees won Grammys. Michael Romanowski won best immersive audio album for a deluxe edition of Alicia Keys’ 2004 album The Diary of Alicia Keys. J. Ivy won best spoken word poetry album for The Light Inside. P.J. Morton won best traditional R&B performance for “Good Morning” (featuring Susan Carol). All three had won previously in those categories. Some have questioned whether their high-profile involvement in the Academy gives them an unfair advantage in the voting.
“I think as long as all the processes are sacrosanct and pristine, which they are, it’s great to have relevant music makers being celebrated,” Mason says. “Having members of board being people at the top of their craft says a lot about who our board is.”
Asked if he can see a sensitivity to having current board members competing for Grammys, he replies, “I can understand people wanting to make sure that it’s fair, which I do believe that it is. I don’t think people are just voting for people because they’re on the board, or because they’re friends. Our voters listen and go through the ballot and vote for people they think are doing great work. Some of these people are going to be on our board. I would love to have as many people on our board as possible that are relevant and contemporary and doing work at the top of their game. I’d hate to see us become an Academy where we didn’t want people who were thriving and winning and succeeding in the music industry on our board.”
Mason’s current, three-year contract with the Academy runs through July 31. Mason won’t say what’s going to happen after that. “I don’t think either side has made a commitment yet or firm decision as to what’s going to take place after July,” he says.
Jay-Z criticized the Academy’s voting processes in accepting the Global Impact Award from the Black Music Collective on this year’s telecast. Billboard’s headline, typical of the way the speech was characterized in the media, read: “Jay-Z Calls Out Grammys Over Beyoncé’s Album of the Year Snubs During Acceptance Speech.”
What did Mason think of the speech? “I’ll just say that when someone that we respect speaks out you always are going to listen,” he said. “Jay is one of the most prolific, most talented and most influential people in our industry. We respect his art and we respect his opinion … We listen and we try to take it in as constructive criticism and get better from it.”
After watching LGBTQ+ artists dominate at the 2024 Grammy Awards, Ryan Butler — the Recording Academy’s vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion — says he’s finally seeing his team’s hard work pay off. “After those wins, I’m confident that we’ve done the work that was needed,” he tells Billboard.
That work, for the last two and a half years, has involved building out the Academy’s DREAM Initiative (Diversity Reimagined by Engaging All Musicmakers). Through the new network, Butler’s DE&I team created a series of what he calls “membership resource groups” to help “create dialogue and a deeper understanding of what support looks like” for underrepresented groups — including women, the Black community and plenty of others. Now, with their most recent group, the Recording Academy is looking at what they can do to help the LGBTQ+ community.
During Grammy Week, the Recording Academy officially launched Academy Proud, their latest membership resource group aimed at increasing representation and visibility among their voting body. Partnering with LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD and queer entertainment organization OUTLOUD, Academy Proud officially launched during a Grammy House event on Sat., Feb. 3.
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So how will Academy Proud actively benefit the LGBTQ+ music community? Below, Billboard chats with Butler about the new initiative, his goals for driving representation at the Academy forward and the work that still needs to be done for underrepresented communities at the Grammys.
Tell me a little bit about how this initiative got started — when did the concept first come up, and when did you decide to partner with GLAAD and OUTLOUD here?
It’s been in my mind for about two and a half years, when we first started to partner with GLAAD. I wanted to create a network of member resource groups — most companies have ERGs (employee resource groups), but we are so member-focused, that I wanted to be a little innovative in this space and create MRGs. So, I created this network called the DREAM network, and under DREAM we have eight priority demographics, and we proceeded to create MRGs around each one of those demographics. So we have Women in the Mix, the Black Music Collective, Grammys Next Gen, Gold Music Alliance, and now Academy Proud. We also have an MRG for the Latin community, for Indigenous people and for disability and accessibility.
For our readers, can you explain how a member resource group works for the Academy’s membership? What is it that an MRG provides directly to members?
On its highest level, it’s driving representation. This is a way for us to really establish a baseline of how many of our members identify as LGBTQ+, and then [that] helps us figure out what we can do to support that membership, to increase representation in that membership. I feel like inclusion and diversity are often action items — it’s very easy to invite people and include them — but you first really need to create a sense of belonging. So, what the membership resource groups do is create a sense of belonging, and give someone who is maybe Grammy-curious, and who may have joined us at a Grammy House event, to know and understand that the Recording Academy can be their home.
Dr. David Jones and Ryan Butler on Feb. 3, 2024 in Los Angeles.
Unique Nicole/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
So what specific initiatives do you see Academy Proud taking on in the coming months or years to actively court a more diverse LGBTQ+ membership base?
Well, I think the visibility of what we did this Grammys Week is going to be amazing for those who may be outside of the Academy wanting to be a part of it, or determining if they’re going to be able to become members. The visibility of having an official Grammy Week activation is huge — but I really want to make sure that we understand what support looks like for the queer community. It’s going to be different for every community. I identify as a Black, gay man; I know that we often talk about intersectionality, but for me, it’s also about indivisibility. I’m always Black, and I’m always gay, and I don’t really live my life in sections. It’s great for us to have that dialogue and to understand how the queer community feels within the music community, and what we as the Academy can do to support the community year round. So if it’s panels, discussions, surveys, gatherings, I want it to be interest-led by the community itself.
We could make a beautiful deck and say “this is what we’re going to do,” but that may not be what the community needs. It’s really important for us to be listening, and to really have a deep understanding of what support looks like. What is stopping you from joining the Recording Academy, and if you have joined, what’s stopping you from being an active member? What barriers do you see to becoming an elected leader? That’s really how we change — it’s about representation on our board of trustees, in our elected positions, as presidents of our chapters.
I know you’re still in the early stages of the initiative here, but in those early stages, has there been any particular feedback that provided a solid baseline of where to start?
I think the recognition is where we really needed to start. In the queer community, we understand that we are the innovators, we understand that we are on the front end of helping to curate and cultivate what’s happening across the culture. I think the first step was the Recording Academy recognizing that, and recognizing the contribution and the impact that the queer community has on music and other cultural areas; music, fashion, film, etc. For us to actually recognize that, I don’t think there’s many organizations that are really standing on the fact that, but for the contributions of the queer community, we would not be where we are today.
The launch of the initiative happened in tandem with this year’s ceremony, which saw a lot of historic wins for the LGBTQ+ community — alongside having a wide range of LGBTQ nominees, three of the Big Four winners were queer women. To what do you attribute this uptick in queer representation at the Grammys?
It’s really because of the hard work we’ve been doing across all of our verticals. Our philosophy is going from the inside out — we’re just now starting to see the “out” part, but the work has been in progress for years. You really have to build a place where someone feels like they belong. Yes, we could have launched Academy Proud two years ago, but we wanted to make sure the LGBTQ community felt like they belonged at the Academy. From here, we just keep moving forward and increasing the representation on our national board and in our programming, and making sure that representation is not just isolated to the month of June.
With those bigger strides, there are also areas where representation is still coming up short — there has been a noticeable lack of trans and non-binary nominees over the last few years, even as the number of LGBTQ+ nominees grew year-over-year.
We can never celebrate too early, and there’s plenty of work still to be done, but I feel like we are in a much better position now. When DE&I is being attacked in so many spaces, I am proud and honored to know that the Recording Academy stands firm in supporting it, and it’s still a part of our values, and we understand how much better we are when we have the contributions of everyone.
That’s especially true as the political right continues to push anti-LGBTQ bills and laws, including laws that aim to restrict performers’ rights to free speech and expression. How do you look at combatting those restrictions from the perspective of providing DE&I resources for the Academy’s membership?
It’s about creators, and it’s about being there 365 days a year. We’re known for Music’s Biggest Night and the awards show that we do, but we’re working through the rest of the year, not just on Grammys night. Whether it’s our advocacy and public policy team in Washington, D.C. or our DEI team, the Academy is here protecting and advocating on behalf of all creators. Whenever there is a creator in a space facing a barrier, it is our job to make sure that we eliminate that barrier, and allow that creator to be their full self.
I want to go back to talking about the trans community, though, because they are the ones being most directly affected by that legislation. With this lack of trans visibility in the music industry at large, including at the Grammys, how does this initiative specifically aim to uplift the voices not only of trans and non-binary artists, but trans and non-binary workers throughout the industry?
That work is not just isolated to Academy Proud — it’s also part of Women in the Mix, where we made a very conscious decision to not use terms like “women-identifying.” We’re here for all women — if you are a woman, you are a woman. We released our Women in the Mix study, and it was the first study that surveyed gender-diverse people in the industry. Now, we do have a baseline for that, and recommendations surrounding that. It really is about that crossover and overlap between our membership resource groups. We are absolutely dedicated to uplifting the trans community, through both Academy Proud and Women in the Mix.
Country star Lainey Wilson and Recording Academy president/CEO Harvey Mason voiced their support for federal regulation of AI technology at a hearing conducted by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet in Los Angeles on Friday (Feb. 2).
“Our voices and likenesses are indelible parts of us that have enabled us to showcase our talents and grow our audiences, not mere digital kibble for a machine to duplicate without consent,” Wilson said during her comments.
“The artists and creators I talk to are concerned that there’s very little protection for artists who see their own name or likeness or voice used to create AI-generated materials,” Mason added. “This misuse hurts artists and their fans alike.”
“The problem of AI fakes is clear to everyone,” he continued later. “This is a problem that only Congress can address to protect all Americans. For this reason, the academy is grateful for the introduction of the No AI FRAUD Act,” a bill announced in January that aims to establish a federal framework for protecting voice and likeness.
The star of the hearing was not from the music industry, though. Jennifer Rothman, a professor of law at University of Pennsylvania Law School, offered an eloquent challenge to a key provision of the No AI FRAUD act, which would allow artists to transfer the rights to their voice and likeness to a third party.
It’s easy to imagine this provision is popular with labels, who historically built their large catalogs by taking control of artists’ recordings for perpetuity. However, Rothman argued that “any federal right to a person’s voice or likeness must not be transferable away from that person” and “there must be significant limits on licensing” as well.
“Allowing another person or entity to own a living human being’s likeness or voice in perpetuity violates our fundamental and constitutional right to liberty,” she said.
Rothman cleverly invoked the music industry’s long history of perpetuity deals — a history that has upset many artists, including stars like Taylor Swift, over the years — as part of the reason for her objection.
“Imagine a world in which Taylor Swift‘s first record label obtained rights in perpetuity to young Swift’s voice and likeness,” Rothman explained. “The label could then replicate Swift’s voice over and over in new songs that she never wrote and have AI renditions of her perform and endorse the songs and videos and even have holograms perform them on tour. In fact, under the proposed No AI Fraud Act, the label would be able to sue Swift herself for violating her own right of publicity if she used her voice and likeness to write and record new songs and publicly perform them. This is the topsy-turvy world that the draft bills would create.”
(Rothman’s reference to Swift was just one of several at the hearing. Rep. Kevin Kiley [R – CA] alluded to the debate over whether or not the singer would be able to make it to the Super Bowl from her performance in Tokyo, while Rep. Nathaniel Moran [R – TX] joked, “I have not mentioned Travis Kelce’s girlfriend once during this testimony.”)
Rothman pointed out that the ability to transfer voice or likeness rights in perpetuity potentially “threatens ordinary people” as well: They “may unwittingly sign over those rights as part of online Terms of Service” that exist on so many platforms and are barely ever read. In the music industry, there is a similar problem already causing problems for a number of young artists who sign up to distribute their music through an online service, agree to Terms of Service without reading them, and later discover that they have unknowingly locked their music into some sort of agreement. In an AI world, this problem could be magnified.
Rothman’s comments put her at odds with the Recording Academy. “In this particular bill, there are certain safeguards, there’s language that says there have to be attorneys present and involved,” Mason said during questioning. (Though many young artists can’t afford counsel or can’t find good counsel.) “But we also believe that families should have the freedom to enter into different business arrangements.”
Mason’s view was shared by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R – FL). “If tomorrow I wanted to sell my voice to a robot and let that robot say whatever in the world that it wanted to say, and I wanted to take the money from that sale and go buy a sailboat and never turn on the internet again, why should I not have the right to do that?” he asked.
In addition to Rothman, Mason and Wilson, there was one other witness at the hearing: Christopher Mohr, who serves as president of the Software & Information Industry Association. He spoke little and mostly reiterated that his members wanted the courts to answer key questions around AI. “It’s really important that these cases get thoroughly litigated,” Mohr said.
This answer did not satisfy Rep. Glenn Ivey (D – MD), a former litigator. “It could take years before all of that gets solved and you might have conflicting decisions from different courts in jury trials,” Ivey noted. “What should we be doing to try and fix it now?”
The Recording Academy announced its Class of 2024 #GRAMMYsNextGen Ambassadors and Advisors on Friday (Jan. 26). The program, which is in its third year, celebrates movers and shakers in the music industry, across the executive and producer categories.
The third annual #GRAMMYsNextGen Party will be held Friday, Feb. 2, for leading creators and professionals who are shaping the future of music, presented by Mastercard and Dyson. And this year’s class will be honored at a private Power Brunch on Saturday, Feb. 3, as part of the Recording Academy’s Grammy House, which features three days of programming targeted to “music makers, culture creators and rising industry leaders.” See a preview of the 2024 Grammy House programming here.
See the entire Class of 2024 #GRAMMYsNextGen Ambassadors and Advisors below.
Executive Ambassadors
Rob Abelow; Founder, Where Music’s Going
Abe Batshon; CEO, Beatstars
Eddie Fourcell; A&R, Prescription Songs
Rachelle Jean-Louis; artist manager (Victoria Monét, Saint Harison)
Heran Mamo; R&B/hip-hop reporter, Billboard
Federico Morris; director of A&R, Range Media Partners
Amal Noor; artist manager (Teezo Touchdown)
Craig Posey; artist manager & community manager, RCE/Vydia
Vladimir “V-Live” Samedi; A&R, Metro Boomin
Ben Schecter; head of brand partnerships, The Revels Group
Executive Advisors
David Ali; founder & CEO, Above Ground Entertainment
Ashley Calhoun; president/head of creative, Pulse Music Group
Alaysia Sierra; head of R&B, Spotify
Producer Ambassadors
Cash Cobain
Hit Girl
Loshendrix
Nascent
Nik Dean
Tommy Parker
Trinity
Wallis Lane
Producer Advisor
Deputy
Laurie Anderson, The Clark Sisters, Gladys Knight, N.W.A, Donna Summer and Tammy Wynette are the Recording Academy’s 2024 lifetime achievement award honorees. Also announced on Friday (Jan. 5), Peter Asher, DJ Kool Herc and Joel Katz are trustees award recipients; Tom Kobayashi and Tom Scott are technical Grammy award honorees; and “Refugee,” written by K’naan, […]
Former Grammys CEO Mike Greene and the Recording Academy are facing a lawsuit alleging Greene sexually assaulted an Academy employee in the 1990s.
In a complaint filed Wednesday (Dec. 6) in Los Angeles court, Terri McIntyre claims that during her tenure at the Academy from 1994 to 1996, she was “forced to endure pervasive, incessant and routine sexual harassment and/or sexual assault” from Greene, who oversaw the Grammys ceremony for 14 years.
The lawsuit accuses Greene of sexual assault and battery and accuses the Academy itself of negligence and other forms of wrongdoing for allegedly enabling the abuse, including by trying to “actively cover-up, conceal and/or repeatedly excuse Greene’s sexual misconduct.”
Greene did not immediately return a request for comment. In a statement, the Academy said: “In light of pending litigation, the Academy declines to comment on these allegations, which occurred nearly 30 years ago. Today’s Recording Academy has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to sexual misconduct and we will remain steadfast in that commitment.”
The new case comes just weeks after another former Recording Academy CEO, Neil Portnow, was sued by an unnamed female musician who says he drugged and sexually assaulted her in 2018. That case, which also named the Academy as a defendant, was filed by the same law firm as Wednesday’s new suit.
Greene, who transformed the Grammy Awards from an industry ritual into a global television event, abruptly resigned from the Academy in 2002 amid accusations of sexual harassment. Though an internal Academy investigation cleared him of wrongdoing and he was paid an $8 million severance, Greene had long been dogged by criticism that ran the organization “almost as a personal fiefdom.”
In Wednesday’s lawsuit, McIntyre says that shortly after starting her “dream job” as the Academy’s Los Angeles chapter executive director in 1994, Greene began to sexually harass her — including by allegedly telling her directly that “he expected plaintiff to perform sex acts for defendant Greene in order to remain employed and progress at defendant Academy.”
“Defendant Greene repeatedly told plaintiff that she needed to ‘give some head to get ahead’,” her lawyers write in the complaint.
According to the lawsuit, harassment then progressed into assault. McIntyre claims that after she drank champagne with Greene and others in his hotel room during a May 1994 work trip to Hawaii, she “quickly began to feel unwell and began to lose control of her physical movements.” She says she then awoke nude in his bed the next morning.
“Plaintiff knew what defendant had done to her,” her lawyers write. “Plaintiff felt wetness between her legs and smelled of intercourse.”
McIntyre says she did not report the incident because Greene “held the power to effectively block her from any further positions in the music industry.” But she claims that he continued to subject her to harassment and unwanted touching, including “groping her buttocks” and breasts.
In another incident, McIntyre says Greene brought her to his home under the guise of a work meeting but then forced her to perform oral sex on him, including by grabbing her by the back of the head and forcing her to continue as she “tried to get away.”
When she finally reported Greene’s behavior to her supervisor, McIntyre says she was told that she “should just find a way to get along” with Green and that if she could not do so, she “would not be successful, or employed, at defendant Academy for very long.”
The lawsuit says McIntyre later resigned and was forced to quit the music industry entirely, moving to her hometown and applying for entry-level jobs. “Plaintiff came to understand that her hopes, dreams, and aspirations to work in the music industry were defunct and unreachable,” her lawyers say, after she spent two years “being prey to a predator that defendant Academy could have stopped.”
McIntyre’s case was filed under California’s AB 2777, a state law that created a temporary window for survivors of sexual assault to file lawsuits that would normally be barred by the statute of limitations. The law, which doesn’t expire until 2026, is similar to New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which led to a flurry of sexual abuse cases in that state over the past month.
A record-breaking 2,400 people have joined the Recording Academy as part of the organization’s 2023 new member class. Fully half of the new class is composed of people of color, while 46% are under the age of 40 and 37% are women. The Academy calls these statistics “a demonstration of the Academy’s commitment to remaking its overall membership.”
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The Academy further said that the 2,400 new members includes 1,700 new voting members and 700 new professional members (people who work in the industry but aren’t involved in the creation of recordings). This brings the total current membership to about 14,000 – 11,000 voting members and nearly 3,000 professional members.
The Recording Academy’s membership model is community-driven and peer-reviewed to create a more diverse and engaged membership base. Since implementing this new membership model in 2019, people of color have gone from comprising 24% of the Academy’s total membership to 38%. The percentage of Academy members who are women has also increased in that time frame, albeit at a more modest rate, from 26% to 30%.
“I’m proud as our organization continues to evolve and build a membership body that reflects the diverse talents and backgrounds that make up our music community,” Harvey Mason, jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, said in a statement. “Our commitment to diversity and inclusivity, however, is an ongoing effort. While we celebrate our progress, we also acknowledge that there’s still more work that must be done. Our members play a crucial role in everything we do, so representation is integral to our mission of supporting and uplifting music makers.”
The Recording Academy reports that the new member class is 50% people of color, 37% white or Caucasian and 13% unknown. The 50% people of color statistic breaks down like this: Black or African American, 28%; Hispanic or Latin, 10%; Asian or Pacific Islander, 5%; South Asian, 2%; Middle Eastern or North African, 1%; and Indigenous or Alaskan native, less than 1%. Four percent replied that they prefer to self-describe.
In terms of gender, 54% of the new member class is male, 37% is female, 8% is unknown and 1% is non-binary. Less than 1% replied that they prefer to self-describe.
In terms of age, 46% of the new class is under 40, 40% is over 40 and 14% is unknown.
All of these numbers refer to total members — which encompasses both voting members and professional members.
The Recording Academy also specifically asked voting members in the new member class to indicate which genres they are most aligned with. (They could choose more than one genre, so the totals exceed 100%.) Pop leads, as expected, with 41%, followed by R&B (29%), rock (23%), rap (22%), jazz (21%), alternative (21%), global music (17%), classical (15%), dance/electronic (15%), contemporary instrumental (13%), American roots music (12%), gospel/Christian (12%), Latin (12%), country (11%), visual media (10%) and seven other genres that each had less than 10%.
Jazz and classical rank higher than their market share would indicate. Latin and country, two of the hottest genres of recent years, rank lower than their market share would indicate; notably, the Grammy nominations that were announced on Nov. 10 were light on Latin and country representation in the Big Four categories. Latin was shut out completely in those marquee categories, while country was represented by just a pair of best new artist nominees: Jelly Roll and The War & Treaty (and that husband-and-wife duo is primarily associated with Americana). This brought criticism from people in the Latin and country fields.
Full statistics surrounding the demographics of the new class can be found here.
The Recording Academy reports that it’s 98% of the way toward its goal of adding 2,500 women voting members by 2025. It expects to achieve this milestone next year, a year ahead of schedule.
The final round of voting for the 66th Annual Grammy Awards extends from Dec. 14 until Jan. 4, 2024. All voting members, including those welcomed in the 2023 new class, are eligible to vote.
In addition to voting in the Grammy Awards process, members can submit product for Grammy consideration, propose amendments to Grammy rules, run for a Recording Academy board position or committee, vote in chapter elections and more.
For more information on the Recording Academy’s membership process and requirements, visit here.
Michael Kushner, Atlantic Records’ executive vp of business & legal affairs/general counsel, will receive the 2024 Entertainment Law Initiative (ELI) Service Award, which is given each year to an attorney who has demonstrated a commitment to advancing and supporting the music community through service.
The award will be presented at the Recording Academy Entertainment Law Initiative event at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Friday, Feb. 2, 2024, two days before the 66th annual Grammy Awards. Michelle Jubelirer, Capitol Music Group chair/CEO, will deliver the keynote address.
“Michael’s dedication to the music industry and his service to the Academy’s Entertainment Law Initiative make him an exceptionally deserving recipient of the ELI Service Award,” Harvey Mason jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, said in a statement. “We look forward to celebrating his accomplishments at the 26th Annual ELI Grammy Week event, and hosting Michelle — a trailblazing woman in music — as the keynote speaker as we gather with the professionals and students making an impact in entertainment law.”
The recipient of the Service Award is selected each year by ELI’s executive committee.
Peter T. Paterno was the Service Award honoree earlier this year. Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, then newly inaugurated, gave the keynote address.
The ELI event will also celebrate the winner and two runners-up of the Entertainment Law Initiative writing competition, co-sponsored by the American Bar Association (ABA), which challenges students in Juris Doctorate (JD) and Master of Laws (LLM) programs at U.S. law schools to research a pressing legal issue facing the modern music industry and outline a proposed solution in a 3,000-word essay. A $10,000 scholarship is awarded to the author of the winning paper, and a $2,500 scholarship is awarded to two runners-up. The winning paper will be published in the ABA’s journal, Entertainment & Sports Lawyer.
The winner will also receive travel and tickets to Los Angeles to attend the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, MusiCares Person of the Year and the ELI event. The contest is open to JD and LLM candidates at U.S. law schools. Students have until Jan. 3, 2024, to enter the contest. See official rules, detailed prize packages and deadlines at recordingacademy.com/eli.
Individual tickets and a limited number of discounted student tickets to the ELI event will go on sale later this month.