Literally minutes after the announcement that the Recording Academy has named Valeisha Butterfield Jones and Panos A.
Mason and Butterfield Jones were in Los Angeles, while Panay was nine hours and thousands of miles away in his home country of Cyprus.
Panay: This is a time of great change in the industry, and I think that environment requires a different management structure and approach, and not just at the Academy.
We also think we can play a greater educational role with respect to our members, and for advocating for the development of creativity and eductation, and we want to give opportunities to as many young people who have something to express as possible.
We want to make sure we’re expanding our benefits to our members, creators and musicians first, and I think giving $24 million in Covid relief to music people is the kind of mission that we want to expand and scale, and together as a collective we have the resources and talent to do that.
Butterfield Jones: We know that young creators and professionals are mission critical to our strategy for the Academy, and for example today we announced TK scholarship fund, to not only invest in talent but also bringing them in at an early stage.
So yes, we will be engaging colleges and universities and our youth programs, but also we’re looking at expanding our presence into historically Black colleges and Hispanic-serving institutions, as well as going beyond and getting deeper into the communities of emerging music creators, to make sure we’re not missing that talent.
specifically, and also thinking about we can work with and go deep into those markets and understand how we can identify and tap into those young leaders that we need to bring into our system in a meaningful way.
I see this as being like an all-star basketball team — the best players we can find and putting the same jersey on all of them — or even a supergroup, knowing very well that each one of them can write their own songs or sing lead but working together and collaborating.
This business is not slowing down, and for us as an Academy to keep up with that pace, we’re going to need a very dynamic leadership group and the structure for us to be making improvements and changing innovation.