The Recording Academy places President and CEO Deborah Dugan on administrative leave with the Grammy Awards fast approaching. Insiders trade accusations.
Yet that’s precisely what it got late Thursday when the advocacy organization that oversees the annual awards ceremony and accompanying prime-time CBS telecast placed its newly installed president and chief executive, Deborah Dugan, on “administrative leave” amid allegations of misconduct.
It was leveled by “a senior female member of the Recording Academy team,” according to a statement the academy issued Thursday, which added that the organization’s board of trustees “has also retained two independent third-party investigators to conduct independent investigations of the allegations.”
“You knew that Deb was going to face a lot of organizational challenges going into this,” said an entertainment industry veteran with knowledge of the workings of ancreated in 2018 to examine issues of gender and racial bias in the music industry and Recording Academy. “I do know the frustration level she was struggling against with this very incestuous, archaic, cronied organizational structure between the board and the [academy’s regional] chapters.
The bombshell developments grew out of efforts the academy began in earnest after the 2018 Grammy ceremony. That’s when then-President and Chief Executive Portnow said backstage, in response to a question about the predominance of male award recipients that evening, that the time had come for women to “step up” to achieve parity. The remark prompted pop star Pink, among others, to call for Portnow to “step down” for the tone-deaf comment on factors working against women in the music industry.
Despite her history with various music-related firms, Dugan was viewed as an outsider by many in an industry that doesn’t routinely welcome them. Former NBC News chief Andrew Lack encountered significant resistance when he took over as head of Sony Music Entertainment in 2003. English financier Guy Hands was roundly pilloried for his handling of EMI Music when his Terra Firma private equity firm acquired it in 2007 and lost an estimated $2.
Bringing change would necessarily present risks. As Dugan put it last week, “I think people are excited. But you know what? Change is disorienting. You start thinking, ‘Hmm, what’s that mean for me?’”As it happened, Dugan reportedly often was at odds with Mason. Some academy officials were put off by a “very different management style” than they had become accustomed to during Portnow’s reign, and bristled at the change. Others, however, praised the new energy and ideas she brought.
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