Interim Recording Academy president Harvey Mason Jr. sent a memo to voting members addressing concerns that were made by former Recording Academy CEO Deborah Dugan.

General counsel, Greenberg Traurig’s Joel Katz, is “being independently investigated by a law firm with no previous ties to the Academy,”.
The Recording Academy was also criticized for paying more than $15 million in legal fees, including a one-time $5 million bonus paid to Greenberg Traurig for negotiating a $500 million deal. “Paying millions of dollars to lawyers is well in line with industry standards,” says Mason.
Mason also noted that the Grammy’s aren’t rigged despite the claims made by Dugan.

Her outrageous assertion that the Grammys are “rigged” is utterly false. We do realize that the nomination and voting process needs to be better understood so we have taken steps to make it more public and to educate people about how it works to preserve fairness and protect Nominations Review Committee members from lobbying and pressure. In addition, as always, our awards process will be reviewed at the upcoming April Awards and Nominations Committee meeting.

Lewis Capaldi let us know that his massive piano power ballad ‘Someone You Loved’ hit one billion streams. He posted this on his instagram:
“And of course when I say OUR achievement I mean MY achievement how dare you try to piggy back on my success you bastards ??It was all me, all along, no help from anyone and another thing I have decided that no one is allowed to make eye contact with me anymore unless they too have 1 billion streams on @spotify so don’t even try it. I am a genius, goodbye”
You have to love his sense of humor.

Billie Eilish dropped the James Bond theme song “No Time To Die“. Eilish is the biggest thing in pop music now. So big that the movie producers are hoping that her theme song will reach a sizable audience and drive them to the theatre in April when the movie is released. It’s an eerie and dark song – captivating as well. Give it a stream.

Arizona Zervas just dropped the official Roxanne video after dominating Spotify the charts as an unsigned artist. Now signed to Columbia, the track is currently sitting at #5 on Spotify’s U.S. Top 50. I like the video and I’ve always like the song the first time I heard it – it’s just fun. The 24 year old will perform at The Echo on 2/24 in Los Angeles. He just wrapped up a guest appearance during Swae Lee’s set in Chicago.

Do you know what I like about Spotify? That it makes an effort to back the artist community. This time they are doing good in trying to help the songwriting community that generally goes unnoticed. What they did was launch a new feature aimed at songwriters, giving them their own profile pages, complete with playlists of recordings of their songs. You’ll be able to seek out songwriters in the search bar just as you would searching for an artist. Moreover, you’ll be able to click on songwriters’ names in the credits and see the songs on the platform that they’ve written and their most frequent and collaborators. Although still in beta, I hope this ends up fully functioning and becomes apart of the Spotify platform.