Neil Portnow: What the Recording Academy Does
One of the questions that’s come up for me, when I first got this job was “How would you describe the Academy if you could do it relatively briefly?” I realized this is a question that comes up a lot because obviously we are known for three and a half hours, one night a year as the Grammy’s. What about all the other things? So I kind of created a little bit of a sound bite to describe what the Academy does, and it’s basically the four pillars of the Academy. In no particular order, the first being “Membership and Awards.” We are by definition, a membership organization and all of our culture and strength really derives from our membership. The membership is directly responsible for the awards process. To the extent that we’ve got a strong, knowledgeable membership, the awards process works really well. Over the past couple years we’ve gotten a lot of praise for the kinds of nominations and awards that we’ve given, in terms of being relevant, in terms of being up to date and really judging excellence. So that’s the first pillar.
The second pillar would be what I call “Music Education, and Archiving and Preservation.” These are parts of our mission that are fulfilled by the Grammy Foundation. The Grammy Foundation is a 5m1c3 charity and really spends its efforts in finding ways to supplement the fact that the Arts in the country are really not a priority and they need to be. If we would say that no child should go without being exposed to music in schools that would be a mantra for us. So that’s part of what we doing in the Grammy Foundation through our programs to fulfill that mission. The other part is archiving and preservation of recorded works. This is an area where as an industry we haven’t done a very good job. We kind of look over at our sister industry at the Motion Picture Academy where they’ve created infrastructure where the original films were all on celluloid, which are destructible and don’t have an indefinite life span. So they’ve done a lot to preserve the great celluloid and the great films of that industry. On the music side, nothing had been done so we went to Congress and in partnership with the Smithsonian, were able to get a grant for archiving and preservation. We now have a national registry, which we induct recordings into. So the Academy continues to be involved in grants and preservation of recorded works, such as, whether it’s Bessie Smith’s recording or the Martin Luther King “I have a dream” speech, which is now preserved in a safe. Those are the missions of that second pillar.
The third pillar is “Philanthropy and Charity, for our own.” That is advanced primarily through the Music Cares Foundation, which raises money and brings in funds to help music people in crises. Whether it be a simple situation where a musician is down on his luck, can’t pay his electric bills and we anonymously, confidentially and go in and take care of that for him. To the more serious kinds of problems such as substance abuse and addiction recovery where we have a Health and Human Services staff around the country that literally is saving lives in the music community. So that’s the third pillar.
The fourth is “Advocacy.” In the current times, more than ever before, the entertainment community, certainly the music industry, is fighting for intellectual property rights and copyrights and the ability of a creative person to actually earn a living by creating the amazing one of kind gifts that they are able to create. Over the past several years we’ve established a full-time office in Washington, dedicated to advocacy with a lobbyist. We’ve actually started something called Recording Arts Day last year, which was a concept coming out of my spending a little bit of time in DC over the past two and a half years of my term.
