How Grammys Boss Harvey Mason jr. Is Navigating AI-Powered Music: ‘This Is the Toughest Part of My Job’

jRecording Academy and MusiCares president/CEO Harvey Mason jr. hasn’t had an easy go of it since taking over the top job in January 2020. The songwriter-producer, who assumed his role on an interim basis before his proper appointment in June 2021, has steered the organization and its flagship awards show, the Grammys, through a rocky half-decade that has included pandemic-plagued cancellations, rescheduling, a last-­minute move to Las Vegas and the Los Angeles wildfires. So he’s reasonably cautious when discussing the upcoming Grammys, set to take place Feb. 1, 2026, at L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena.

“There have been a lot of last-minute issues,” Mason says with a sigh. “I’m just going to keep my fingers crossed and hope this is going to be my first — I don’t want to call it ‘uneventful’ because it’s going to be a massive event — but hopefully, it’s the first event where we don’t have an outside force affecting how we produce the show.”

This Q&A has also been released as an episode of Billboard’s new music business video podcast, On the Record. The episode is now available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Mason has also spent his time as president/CEO righting the academy’s course and picking up the pieces after previous CEO Deborah Dugan accused a member of the academy’s senior leadership of sexually harassing her and the organization at large of widespread corruption. (Dugan herself was accused of workplace harassment, which she denied.) Her predecessor, Neil Portnow, infamously told women in music to “step up” if they wanted to receive Grammy recognition and was accused of sexual assault. (He denied the claim, and in 2024, a lawsuit against him was dismissed.)

It now seems as though Mason’s overhaul has paid off. Over 70% of the academy’s roughly 15,000 voting members have been added since 2019, including a slew of new, more diverse voters from different corners of the world. Among voting members, according to a 2024 membership data report, the percentage of people of color has grown by 65%, while Black or African American membership has grown by 90%; more than 3,000 women have also joined as voting members. In turn, the new membership has voted to create several categories, including best African music performance, songwriter of the year and best remixed recording.

The changing membership helps to explain the significant Grammy breakthroughs by underrepresented artists in recent years. In February, for example, Beyoncé took home her first trophy for album of the year, an award that has been historically hard for artists of color to win. For the 2026 ceremony, K-pop artists have broken through for the first time in the song of the year category with the nominations of HUNTR/X’s “Golden” and Rosé and Bruno Mars’ “APT.” And come February, Bad Bunny will compete for album, song and record of the year — the first time a Spanish-language artist has been simultaneously nominated for all three categories.

Audiences have responded positively to the changes: According to media reports, in 2024, viewership of the Grammy telecast jumped by 34% to a post-pandemic high of roughly 17 million; while that figure dropped by 9% in 2025, the broadcast generated 102.2 million social media interactions, the highest traffic ever recorded for a social media broadcast.

Still, Mason faces new challenges. Most importantly, he says, is how the academy will decide to treat songs and recordings that have been generated or assisted by artificial intelligence. “This is the toughest part of my job. I represent 40,000 members of the academy, and we’re trying to figure out where is the best place to sit [on AI],” he admits. “It probably sounds a little crazy, like, ‘This guy doesn’t have his position together,’ but it’s really tough because I want to advocate for our human members and human creators, but I also realize that this technology is here.”

But daunting as the future may be, Mason is humbled by his role and the storied legacy of the Recording Academy and the Grammys. “I look back at people like Quincy Jones, who was somebody that I always respected and wanted to be like,” he says. “I would think about him doing his Grammy ballot and voting for me as a songwriter, as a producer. Now, I don’t know if he ever did, but that was what was in my mind — my peers, the people that I admired, evaluating my work. That just meant so much to me.”

Country music had an amazing year in popular culture, but it didn’t make a strong showing in the general categories for 2026. How does the Recording Academy handle situations like this to make sure there is good genre representation across the board in the general categories?

We don’t. That happens by the voters. We don’t try to mitigate it, but we try to make sure our voting body is representative of the different genres by using the different constituencies and groups of people that are making that music. So we make sure that if we’re underindexing in a certain area, we go into those communities and say, “Hey, we need you to be a part of our organization. If you’re a music professional, please join.” And we do a lot of outreach. We do a lot of communication. But I also want to say that as much as country is not represented in the general field, country is represented so well across the ballot. Across our 95 categories, there’s great country music being made this year and great nominees.

Every year, onlookers point out that there’s someone in the best new artist category who has been working in the industry for years. This year, it’s The Marías. While they’ve been at it for a long time, it’s their first time to be nominated for a Grammy, making them eligible for this award. Do you still feel like this is the right way to approach the category?

It’s more than just a category for people who haven’t been nominated before. It’s for an artist that breaks through in the year. The name of it sometimes catches us or trips us up a little bit because a lot of the artists aren’t new, but it’s an artist that has finally broken through. There’s maybe artists that have been toiling and working and writing and creating for so long, but now they finally came to national prominence or national consciousness. And for us, we want to celebrate those artists. Whether or not we want to say “new artist” or “breakthrough artist” — maybe that’s where the conversation should be.

In the streaming age, where we can listen to any song at our fingertips, listenership has fragmented. How does the Recording Academy deal with fragmentation and the fact that music fans are listening to more subgenres and global artists than ever?

I think it’s the coolest thing ever. I would much rather that be the environment we’re working in rather than have a few select people who are driving what we all are listening to. I don’t know if there’s been a more exciting time in music than right now, and the things that we’re all nervous about — whether that’s the dreaded AI conversation or the consolidation of label power — the ability for music lovers to find different kinds of music and have it at their fingertip tips at any given moment is really, really exciting.

As a person who’s running the academy, along with our board and executive leadership, I want to make sure that our membership represents what’s happening in the music business right now. So I want to make sure there’s members from different parts of the world. We can’t all be just from one place. We can’t all be just people who love one kind of music. We can’t all be people who look a certain way or are a certain gender or are a certain age. We need everybody to be able to come in and advise us as an organization.

You took the helm in 2020 during a turbulent time, and over the last five years, you’ve really changed the voting body of the academy. Seventy percent of voters this year have been added since 2019, right?

Yes, exactly. The other stat that’s interesting is 100% of our voters have been requalified. So everybody who’s a voting member, we looked at their credits, and we’ve made sure they have relevant credits within the last five years and they know the music. That’s the cool thing about the Grammys: They’re voted on by all music professionals. It’s not popularity, it’s not journalists — no offense.

None taken!

It’s not about how many streams you have, how many followers you have or people’s opinions of you in the general consumer audience. It’s about your peers, the professional music people, really listening, really evaluating the music and nominating the people they think have done it best in that year. And it’s subjective, so it’s impossible. We wanted to make sure the membership was relevant and knew what was going on in the different genres because they could vote accurately and have good outcomes.

Last year, Chappell Roan dedicated part of her acceptance speech when she won best new artist to mentioning how artists often go without health care or health insurance. I know the Recording Academy’s nonprofit arm, MusiCares, is an important part of its work. Could MusiCares provide any remedy for this issue?

Well, first of all, I couldn’t be more excited about the sentiment of what Chappell brought up in her speech — her passion and advocacy for music people — because I feel the same way. I wake up every day thinking, “What can we do for our community?” Insurance and health care is a big challenge for us because none of us [musicians] are working for companies that offer retirement packages or health insurance. And it’s not just artists: It’s the songwriters, the engineers, it’s the musicians; we don’t have access to that. MusiCares doesn’t do that specifically or directly, but the academy has been sourcing low-cost insurance opportunities for our members over the last five years, and we’re trying to develop more things like that so we can fill gaps.

We haven’t nailed it all because we only have a certain pool of resources to work with, but these are things that we are super passionate about. We also have an advocacy department in [Washington] D.C. and on the state level where we’re fighting for the rights of music people, not just on copyright protection and AI protection — it’s everything to be helpful to the music community.

A few years ago, Justin Bieber was nominated in a pop category for his song “Yummy,” and he spoke out publicly, saying he was upset because he felt the song was R&B. How does the academy balance the wishes of artists for what category they compete in and what the general public may see that artist as?

I’ll start with the process. You enter your music in a category and then add what genre you believe you should be competing in. Sometimes you, as an artist, may have a different opinion of what type of music you think you’re making. So we created committees of experts. If you’re talking about a record that’s either pop or R&B, we have a committee of pop songwriters, producers, executives, artists, engineers that exclusively work in that genre. Then we’ll have the same committee in R&B.

We can only try our best because this is all subjective. Nobody can definitively, factually say a piece of music is definitely a certain genre. The thing that we’ve tried to do over the last five years, however, is pay much more reverence or respect to artist intent, so when an artist submits in a certain category, whether it be jazz or pop or rock, that committee is instructed to make sure they’re paying attention to where it was entered. To do that, we’ve adjusted those committees’ ability to move things to other genres easily. Now it has to be a super majority — 66.66% has to vote that it is not of that genre in order to move it.

One of the biggest breakthrough genres of the last decade is K-pop, which historically hasn’t fared well at the Grammys. Billboard wrote a story before the nominations were announced, asking if the music needed its own Grammy category or if it should compete in the typical pop categories. When the nominations came out, K-pop artists really broke through: “Golden” by HUNTR/X from the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack and “APT.” by Rosé and Bruno Mars were both nominated for song of the year, for example. In light of the nominations, what do you think? Should K-pop have its own category?

Luckily, you or I don’t have to have the answer because our categories are determined by the music community. So the music community will survey the landscape. Hopefully, we have enough experts in the space with our new membership to say, “Hey, you know what? K-pop is really doing its thing. We need a category for K-pop.” They can then write a proposal. The proposal comes into the board, and the board says, “You know what? I think you’re right. Let’s have a category.” That’s the process that happens every year. So I would imagine, with what’s been happening recently with K-pop artists and K-pop music, the prevalence of the popularity of it, there’s going to be more and more momentum, both in the music community and the academy elected leadership, to discuss that.

Recently, you said in an interview that pretty much every songwriter and producer you know is using AI in some way in the studio. Exactly how are you seeing professional songwriters and producers utilize it?

It runs the gamut of people texting lyrics or ideas or how they feel when they wake up and generating an entire track, lyrics and melody from it. That’s the far end of the spectrum. The other side of the spectrum is somebody who has just produced an entire song, but they can’t figure out the bridge section, or they can’t figure out one line, or they can’t figure out a melody to finish the chorus, and they ask one of the platforms to create that as a way to supplement what they’ve already done. That’s the other end of the spectrum. Everything in between is what I’m seeing in the studio.

I’ve seen people having one of the platforms writing lyrics after they’ve already played all the chords, or taking lyrics that have been generated and building songs around that, or having AI vocals on a song that you wrote because you can’t sing. I know one person who writes on acoustic guitar and whistles the melodies and puts that into one of the models, and the model spits out songs. I know another person who’s a poet and they put that into the model, and it spits out a fully produced demo. It’s all over the map.

These people that are professionals are generally somewhere in the middle, where they’re using it as a tool. They’re unlocking something when they’re stuck on a lyric, or they’re trying to find 15 things that rhyme with “this.” Also, people are using it as inspiration, not just taking what it gives you. They are just using it as a launch point.

In 2023, when Ghostwriter’s fake Drake song “Heart on My Sleeve” was popular, you told The New York Times that the song could be eligible in the songwriting-based categories at the Grammys, which caused some uproar. Most people didn’t know at the time that “Heart on My Sleeve” was a human-made song. The only thing that was AI was the voice filter that made him sound like Drake and The Weeknd. Is this still your stance for AI-assisted music?

Yes, and the converse is true, too. Something can still be nominated in a performance category [if] AI created [it] or wrote the music and a human sang it. Using AI does not make your entry ineligible. It just makes you have to choose the right categories to be considered in.

What if AI deepfaking is involved, like in “Heart on My Sleeve,” where Ghostwriter didn’t get Drake’s or The Weeknd’s permission?

There are things that can disqualify a recording, absolutely. If you’re doing something illegal or something that affects an artist in a way that is protected, there are things that we can do to avoid that. But all that is starting to look really blurry and needs clarification more now than ever.

In 2027, the Grammys will be moving to ABC, Hulu and Disney+. Given that so many viewers want to stream the Grammys now, will you take this opportunity to evolve the way you’re formatting or putting together the show?

Obviously, this will give us the ability to reach more people in different parts of the world, which is exciting, but it is going to make us rethink and reimagine. If you’re building a show now, what would it look like? Do you have to account for commercial breaks? Do you have to account for different segmented audiences? There’s so many considerations when you’re programming a show for linear broadcast that maybe you wouldn’t have if you were doing it for just streaming. The thing for us is, though, that we are still going to be on ABC, so we will still be making a show built for ABC, but also Disney+. Finding that sweet spot is going to be challenging but really exciting.

How often do people ask you if the Grammys still matter?

I used to get asked that a lot when I first took this role, and my answer was a little more tentative: “I think the Grammys really matter.” I’ve always wanted to win one. My family’s always respected it. Everybody I’ve ever worked with has always wanted to win one, but I understand that there were some people that didn’t feel the same way. But now, four or five years later, I can tell you for sure, the Grammys matter, and people, I think, respect the academy and the Grammys — well, not everybody. I wish everybody did because of what the academy stands for and what the Grammys stand for, but I do think it’s something people aspire to because of the fact that it is your peers [voting]. It’s not just the popularity contest or who’s got a bunch of streams. It’s your peers, the people you work with, the people that you respect, the people that you’ve looked up to maybe your whole career.

This story appears in the Dec. 6, 2025, issue of Billboard.