Portnow The Recording Academy and It’s Foundations

Well, membership is part of it. Our dues at this point structure are 100 dollars so it’s a very modest amount. I’d venture to say we spend far more than that on a per capita basis, per member. The Lion’s share of the Academy’s income comes from the fee, which we receive from CBS who’s the broadcaster of the Grammy telecast. That is the Lion’s share of our income. We also have a number of relationships with corporate America where we have sponsorship deals, which bring in a fair amount of revenue; so that’s another source. Then of course our charities, we have two separate foundations which are a whole other story. I’m sure you’ll want to get to that at some point.
(Question asked) It’s the Grammy Foundation and the Grammy Foundation is the part of our organization that deals with two primary missions: one is music education, particularly for young people and the second key element of the mission is archiving and preservation of recorded works. We have a big part in that as well. The other foundation is the Music Cares Foundation. That foundation is dedicated really to philanthropy and charity for our own music people. We realized as an organization 16 years ago when Music Cares was founded that within the music industry there really wasn’t anyone taking care of music people who had problems, crises, financial or otherwise. We looked at sister organizations such as the Motion Picture Academy who had a longstanding setup where they have a retirement home, they have funds for people in their industry that are in need and we thought that was something that we should do. No one else in the industry was doing that. Music Cares was born at that point and 16 years later we’ve helped thousands of music people from the most basic problem to, you know, if you were a guitar player and you break arm, having nothing to do with anything, and you can’t work, and how are you going to pay your electric bills? You can come Music Cares anonymously, confidentially, and if you qualify as someone who’s legitimately in the industry, we’ll pay that electric bill for you. That’s the most basic. The more complicated and serious is our whole substance abuse program where we have caregivers and Health and Human Services people around the country who refer music people into programs and get them help. Then in the last year we merged with another well-known organization called MAP, Musicians Assistance Program, and that is run by Buddy Arnold who is doing the same thing. Together as a combined entity we’re probably the leading organization in the music world that helps reach out to music people that have substance problems. So that is our Music Cares Foundation.

Most recently, I think the thing we’re most proud of is the Music Cares Hurricane Relief Fund, which we established three days after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and we funded with an initial one million dollar contribution. We’ve now raised over four million dollars, we’ve helped over three thousand music people getting back on their feet and then we’ve also partnered with the Edge and Bob Ezrin who’ve set up Music Rising. The goal of that initiative is really to raise funds to buy instruments to replace those instruments that we lost by the people on the Gulf Coast. We just handed out our one thousandth guitar at South by Southwest about three weeks ago and it’s a very proud moment for Music Cares, to be involved in all this

Both of the Foundations, Music Cares Foundation and the Grammy Foundation, are 5m1c3’s. They have their own independent Boards of directors, and they have their own fundraising initiatives. Perhaps the best known of those would be the Music Cares Person of the Year Dinner that we hold two nights before the Grammy’s every year. We’ve honored some of the great icons in music, from Bonnie Raitt and Tony Bennett and Quincy Jones and Paul Simon. The most recent folks that we’ve honored were Bono in New York when I first started three and a half years ago, then we had Sting two years ago, last year Brian Wilson and then James Taylor. That’s a massive industry dinner, it’s probably, I think, the most significant, size wise, fundraising event in the music industry. That’s about a three and a half million-dollar night for the Music Cares foundation. That brings in quite a bit of our revenue for the program.

The Recording Academy writes a very healthy check of well in excess of a million dollars to each of the foundations for operational costs. We also have a pretty good setup with eBay where we have lots of items that come in from out musician friends and the stars and the famous folks, which are put up for auction. The proceeds of those come back to our foundations as well.

Well I get here every day and preside over all of the activities of the Recording Academy, and I am also fortunate to be the president of both of the foundations. I am the president of both the Grammy Foundation and the Music Cares Foundation. Additionally we have the Latin Recording Academy, LATIS (?) which has its own board of directors and its own president but because it’s a sister organization of ours, I function in an advisory role and work with them on their projects as well. So the sum total of that is that I oversee a staff of about 170, 120 here in Los Angeles, we have 50 in the field. We have twelve of what we call chapters, which are separate offices in major music centers around the country. When you join as a member, you join the national organization, but you’re affiliated with the chapter that’s closest to you geographically. So we have that infrastructure. As I said, our membership is about 18,000, so the combination is a big job because this is a hybrid nonprofit. We are a business in the sense that we’re a 50 million dollar a year operation with a large staff, with a large membership and with a lot of activities that we produce. So it’s a job that encompasses many different facets for me.

Well, if we were a for profit business, and also if we weren’t about an awards process that requires a certain amount of, shall I say, fairness, level playing field, playing Switzerland if you were, we might approach this a little differently. You might see Grammy pens and you might see Grammy toothpicks and you might see all kinds of commercial enterprises but because we’re an awards process, which needs to have a level of excellence and a level of subtlety, and a level of good taste, we don’t approach this in quite the same ways as a commercial enterprise. But at the same token, we need to make sure the world is well aware of what we do and of the “Grammy brand” if you will. Actually, we’ve taken some steps recently to expand the Grammy brand so that we’re beyond what’s in the public’s mind at this point, which is primarily three and a half hours of television, one night during the year and we’re much more than that.