In late January, mere days before the 2020 Grammy Awards were to take place, a series of allegations made by former Recording Academy CEO Deborah Dugan became public. The crisis spelled a huge hit to the credibility of the 62-year-old organization. Viewership had already been in decline for a while, culminating in a 12-year low this year. While artists and their fan-bases have been increasingly suspicious of the Academy’s tactics in recent years, there hasn’t been much in the way of credible evidence until now. The big question is this: will the Recording Academy be able to recover from the seemingly incriminating allegations made by Dugan or will this mark the beginning of the end for ‘music’s biggest night’?
Details surrounding the controversy do very little to cast the Recording Academy in a positive light. On Jan. 16, the Academy decided to fire Dugan, citing allegations of bullying by an administrative assistant. However, the factor that undermines the Academy’s story is that Dugan had filed a memo a month prior to her ousting which detailed her concerns about the processes and policies of the organization. This detail makes the organization’s actions in removing Dugan appear retaliatory, especially as they did not act on the allegation until she had made accusations of her own. Furthermore, the accusation of bullying for which she was supposedly ousted was made by the former assistant to Neil Portnow, Dugan’s predecessor whom she had actively been outspoken against. For context, Dugan had been hired to polish up the Academy’s image after Portnow was forced to resign due to sexist remarks he made in the media. Dugan claims that she was directed to approve a bonus for Portnow, who was quietly retained as a consultant, despite also having been accused of rape by a musician. Additionally, Dugan alleged that the Academy operated as an old boy’s club, with ‘old, white men’ autonomously choosing nominees based on favoritism, and was rife with racist and sexist biases.
The Academy’s response has not been reassuring. For one thing, the organization failed to take seriously the recommendations of its Task Force on Diversity (which came out in support of Dugan). Additionally, the organization has only made blanket, unspecific denials of the allegations.
To regain the trust of the public and the artists that they were created to serve, the Recording Academy should implement the following recommendations:
- Appoint more minority and female members to the academy voters and to leadership positions. A few years ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made a show of inviting more female and minority members to its ranks after being accused of prejudicial voting — the Recording Academy should follow suit to show that it values diverse representation in its ranks. Additionally, with the organization never having had a leader from a minority background and Dugan being the first-ever female CEO in its 62-year history (who was only hired to clean up the organization’s image), taking deliberate steps to appoint more diverse leaders will go some way towards showing that the Recording Academy is ready to come out of the dark ages. Solving this problem will require a great deal of organization-level change.
- Make committees more transparent (or abolish them all together). A recurring theme in Dugan’s allegations was the existence of secret committees with the power to overrule the voting decisions of the Academy’s wider membership. The composition and activities of these committees should be made open and their decisions should be open to scrutiny by members and the public.
- Implement recommendations made by the Task Force on Diversity. The task force is a step in the right direction. However, the Academy needs to take the recommendations for it to mean anything.
- Create more task forces and invite external bodies to conduct investigations into processes, with a focus on fairness. The diversity task force only addressed diversity and inclusion in the nomination process and academy governance. The issues of the Academy go beyond a lack of diversity — the issues outlined by Dugan reflect a lack of accountability and fairness, as well as a resistance to change. Independent task forces must be created to identify specific inadequacies, their causes, and recommend further solutions to address these problems.
Whether the Recording Academy will ever be seen as trustworthy again remains unclear but what is clear is that the organization has been resistant to the ways music has evolved in recent times. Major award categories remain predominantly white, predominantly male, and tend to celebrate music that is more reminiscent of a bygone era. As newer artists continue to speak out against Grammy decisions (even while accepting awards on the Grammy stage), the Recording Academy should worry about an increasing loss of legitimacy. If it ever wants to regain the respect and reverence it was once afforded, the recording Academy must make monumental changes to its very systems, structures, and processes.
CONTROL, by Fiayo. 