Name: Brainstorm Tech 2023: The Future of Music
Uploaded: 2023-07-12
Duration: 14 min 54 s
Description: Harvey Mason, Jr., Chief Executive Officer, The Recording Academy In conversation with: Terri Burns, Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Harvey Mason, Jr., Chief Executive Officer, The Recording Academy In conversation with: Terri Burns, Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Brainstorm Tech 2023: The Future of Music

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As we continue to witness, no industry is immune to the disruption caused by A I, especially in the world of entertainment. With the rise of A, I mimicked voices and auto tunes. A significant debate has emerged regarding the role and right of creators. Our final guest best for last has worked with icons like Beyonce, Justin Timberlake and Whitney Houston. Just to name a few. His talent and expertise in the music industry has garnered multiple Grammy nominations beyond the awards. He is a visionary leader who actively championed the rights and well being of music creators as the CEO of the recording academy. The organization behind the Grammys. Harvey Mason Jr has embraced cutting edge technologies and paved the way for groundbreaking collaborations between artists and tech innovators ultimately shaping the future of the music of the music industry. I'm really looking forward to hearing his vision on the intersection of creativity and tech. Please welcome Harvey Mason Jr. Thanks sir. Of course. Thank you for being here. Harvey. Excited to chat today. My pleasure. So let's get into it first. Can we talk about getting younger? Oh, my goodness. Yeah, I want to do all that. How's that? How's that going for you? It's not working. All right. Well, you know what music keeps us young. Um And so you obviously help us, help us all with that a little bit. A few A I songs have gone viral this year. Notably hard on my sleeve, which sounded a lot like Drake in the weekend. It went viral before it was removed from streaming platforms earlier this year. So curious to know, what did you think of this song? And, or what did you think of this? A I trend in music in general? Starting with the song, I thought the song was great. It was a bop, right? It was hot. It was well done. Clearly, somebody with a lot of talent put it together, the voice modeling did replicate Drake in the weekend and when you say it sounded kind of like them to me, it sounded exactly like them, which is, I guess a little scary, but also really interesting, which is, I think the topic of the conversation is what is a I going to mean for the future of artistry or creativity? And you saw that in that song hard on my sleeve. The possibilities are endless. You have to really look at it through the lens for me and I'm jumping ahead and maybe you're going to ask me this, but look at it from the perspective of the, of the consumer things that they want, they want more music. You've seen more music being created and released now than ever for, we had more submissions at the Grammys in the history of our organization. Last year, more songs are being released every day than ever before on the platform. So consumers want music by their favorite artists, they want to hear their favorite singers or rappers performing songs. So the possibility of A I contributing to that is both interesting and a little bit scary. 100%. It's an opportunity. But I also think that there are some risks there as well. Thinking about this shifting consumer demand. What about on the creator side? So you obviously work with lots of creators. How are they embracing this technology or not? I don't think they're embracing it yet because it's scary when you hear your voice being replicated without an agreement or even attribution or remuneration coming back to you as an artist or as a singer or as a writer, it's going to be scary. These are things we've worked our whole lives to be able to do. I'm a songwriter. I studied, I practiced, I tried for years to be able to sit at a piano and come up with something from my heart, from my soul, from the story of my life. And now to imagine a computer, you can type in, in a prompt and you can do that in 10 seconds. It's frightening beyond belief. But the potential and the possibilities are endless and I think if we get the right guide rails in place, a I can be a creative amplifier, not a replacement for creativity. And that's, that's the way I look at it. And that's what technology has been throughout history since somebody invented a drum or a wood with a piece of stick with some holes in it. A flute, those are all ability to record. Those are all advancements that allowed creatives to do more creating and I see AI as a potential extension of that. So in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, you mentioned that you and your team will continue to assess A I technology and that the rules and regulations for how it will be treated at the recording academy naturally will, will evolve over time as well. This might be a little bit of a challenging question. But if you could predict five years from now, what you think the rules are going to be at the recording academy around A I technology and submission, what do you think that's going to look like? I don't imagine it'll be too dissimilar from what they are now, which is we're going to award human creativity. You can use A I to create music and still submit. And there was a misconception about that and there was people misinterpreted our rules that AI generated music was not eligible. That's absolutely false music that is generated by AI is eligible for nomination as long as there is human interaction by more than a diminimus amount as long as somebody is either singing or has been writing on that piece of music, it's eligible. So in five years, you're going to see more ai you're going to see more, probably a higher percentage of AI music being created and submitted. But I still believe, I think at this point sitting here today that will as an academy want to award human creativity. And besides that, I can't even understand how we would award a Grammy to what a computer or what are we doing? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that actually, you know, begs a really interesting question around fairness, compensation, recognition for work. Should artists, for example, be compensated when their work is used to, let's say, train a neural network. Well, I grew up listening to Michael Jackson and Prince and Earth Wind and Fire and Christopher Columbus and Aero Smith. You know, and I write songs based on the things that I heard my whole life and I'm not paying them. So it's a little bit controversial because a lot of people are saying we've got to look at what they're learning from and we've got to be able to identify it and then make sure there's a payment going back to the original. But they're listening to millions of songs just like I listened to millions of songs growing up. I listen to rock, I listen to country, listen to jazz and all that gets ingested into my tiny small brain computer and then I create from that. So I'm not sure how far we're going to get with trying to figure out what it's learning from how we're going to pay all those people different splits and publishing percentages. It would be nice if we could figure that out. I'm just not sure how that's going to work yet and I'm not even sure it's realistic. I do believe that as AI evolves, we're going to be able to identify what A I has done to create. What portion of the creativity has been done by AI, you never know, maybe there's a I that can identify A I. So sure, yeah, the possibilities are endless. It's wide open. I am going to turn it over to the audience in just a second. So if anyone has questions, please do start getting those ready. I want to zoom out a little bit moving just, you know, outside of just music and hear a little bit about your point of view on the writers' strike, which is ongoing? How is it or is it not impacting the music industry? As we know, there's been a lot of conversation with the strike around AI as well. Curious how that that overlaps with your world. The writer strike absolutely impacts our world because another avenue of creativity and they're fighting for a lot of things that are going to come up in music as well. Ownership, intellectual property ownership and protection, copyright protection, royalties, back end participation. These are all things that they're, they're contemplating in some new deal. I'm not sure how, how much progress they're making right now. Unfortunately, I have to imagine. I'm sure everybody here believes the same thing. A I is not going anywhere. A I is going to do what it does. A I is going to be in music, it's going to be in film, it's going to be in business. We have to figure out how to not regulate but have some. I said it before guide rails some markers around it to make sure that we can ensure creatives are still being compensated and ownership can be regulated because right now the copyright office doesn't know what to do with AI creative materials. They literally don't, I had a meeting with them. They said we're trying to figure it out how much is human interaction because that's what a copyright is based on. Human interaction is one prompt, human interaction is three prompts human interaction. So that's got to be sorted out. But A I is here. It's left the station, it's going to be used. It's been being used for a long time. I think it's just kind of, as you said earlier, come to a tipping point. I want to turn it over to the audience. Are there any questions in the room? I know the whole room is probably using A I to write music, right? I know literally. Well. Oh, here's one. We have one right there. Hi, I'm Joe with CBS News. I, I'm curious to know even though artists seem to be quite scared of a, I not quite using it yet. How much harder is it now with tiktok and all of these different platforms to write a good hit. It's no harder now than it was before to write a good hit. I don't think you still have to put in the time you still have to be relevant. You have to have a story. And this is a lot of people ask me about A I and is A I going to replace artistry or potentially artists. And I personally, maybe I'm a sucker but I don't believe it will. I think it's something about humans, something about our experience, our interaction, our collaboration that can't be replicated. Now, some people will say, well, machine learning and there's algorithms and they're going to figure it out. But what we like about our art isn't just what we see on the canvas or what we hear in the song. It's the story behind it. It's the people that make it. It's the intrigue and the interest around who created it and why, where did it come from? What life experience is reflected in that art and that's what I think is going to be missing in ai creativity. Having said that as a producer or any type of creator, a part of our job is to edit and curate, aggregate, curate and have taste discernment, decide what's cool, what's not cool. I see AI as providing opportunity to give us more inputs, more, more things to choose from, more things to edit, put together, remix together. And I believe that's what's going to potentially heighten or take creativity to another level. So I don't think AI is ever going to replace us. I hope as creators, but I do think it will be a really productive tool to come up with new things, things we haven't heard before. And that's the coolest part about music is using technology to come up with something that people haven't heard. That's what's interesting. That's when a new artist comes out with a new sound or a new almost twist on a genre or a style of singing that we've never heard before, we gravitate towards those, they resonate with us. So I think there's a lot of potential there. It is scary. But to your point about artists being afraid of it, I'm not a singer. So I don't know what it would feel like to have to hear my voice on a platform or on the radio and say, hey, why I didn't do that jump in. Yeah, let's try it, go for it. So I can't imagine what that would feel like. But there is potential. If you're a popular artist, you could have hundreds thousands of songs coming out every year that you didn't record if we can figure out how to make sure there's proper attribution, credit and remuneration. There's, you know, a structure for payment. I'm not sure if there's a huge downside to artists letting people use their voice. Some people will say, well, it dilutes my brand. It's going to say Whitney Houston AI version, not Whitney Houston live version. So everyone's going to know that's not Whitney deciding what the song is. And there's a lot of market research that's done by putting out 100 songs or 1000 songs. Oh, this, the audience really loved Whitney Houston songs when I sang, you know, hard rock records. I'm going to go as an artist and do that. So there's a lot of upside to ai artistry and creativity that I'm not sure everyone's thought about yet, but it'll be figured out. I'm very confident, kind of jumping off of that. I'm curious, putting ai aside, what are some of the trends that you're seeing, creators, songwriters? What are the trends that you're noticing? New artists are kind of leaning on to now outside of AI outside of technology, just creative trends. Well, it's global, you're getting influences from other parts of the world, the Middle East, Africa, India, you're seeing music totally change. The borders are coming down, the languages are falling, the biggest artists in the world are not from the US right now. So the US artists are starting to pay attention. They're starting to collaborate, they're starting to feature on other types of records. So I think the biggest trend in music right now is the globalization of it's happening. It's a $26 billion sold music market right now and it's never been higher. It's going up 10% a year. Two years ago, the Middle East was the fastest growing music market. Last year, Africa was the fastest growing music market. So if anything on the creative side, I think it's trying to make music that is more global, that is potentially reaching wider audiences. We've always been so focused on Western audiences in the US or maybe parts of Europe. There's a 1.4 billion people in Africa on the continent that love and consume music. The same can be said for India, same can be said for Southeast Asia. So that would be a trend that I think a lot of people are paying attention to. I think on that note, you know, music has always had a very magical way of bringing the world together and making it a little bit smaller. So thank you for that Harvey. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you, Terry. It's good to be here. Ok? Um That is a wrap. I can't believe it. Thank you so much on behalf of, of uh brainstorm tech fortune. Um Our coaches, I just want to express my sincere thanks to all of you for being here with us. The past three days. Um Thank you to our discussion leaders, our speakers, our event partners for making this possible. Um We are so grateful to all of you. We're thrilled to announce that and brainstorm tech is going to be back again next year, of course, but please stay tuned for more details. We will be in touch for sure. Um We also have rainstorm A I happening December 11th and 12th in San Francisco. For those of you who are interested um stay in touch, stay connected with us. Please. Safe travels for everybody who is traveling and thank you so much again for being here with us and for participating.