Business

Julie Greenwald was in Los Angeles, on the set of the video shoot for Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga‘s “Die With a Smile,” when she found out her life was about to look very different. “All of a sudden, I get told, ‘Hey, we’re gonna change your role,’” she recalled. “It was wild. I’ve been on this run for 35 years. But listen: shit happens. And there’s a lot of stuff that’s not in your control, especially when you work for someone else.”
Greenwald was one of several high-ranking veterans who exited Atlantic Music Group last year during a broader restructuring at both Atlantic and its parent company, Warner Music Group. She spoke about the experience briefly Tuesday night (April 1) during a conversation with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute, where she is serving as the program’s Executive In Residence this month.

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The post-Atlantic period has “been a huge pivot for me,” Greenwald said. “I went out on a high in terms of setting up my records. But there’s nothing more brutal than, all of a sudden, the consolidation.”

The talk at the Clive Davis Institute marked some of Greenwald’s first comments since splitting from her old gig, and a rare chance to see a music industry luminary speak off the cuff — about Atlantic’s decision to drop Chappell Roan in 2020, her frustration with data-driven A&R, and the challenge of working with young artist managers who rarely understand the music business. 

Lowe steered the conversation to Roan almost by accident; he appeared not to know that Atlantic had initially signed the star back in 2015. The singer released her debut EP through the label in 2017, and followed it with “Pink Pony Club” in April 2020, just as COVID-19 was tearing through the U.S. “The pandemic was the craziest time to be running a record company,” Greenwald said. 

Labels were forced to try to sign artists over Zoom, which she called “disgusting” — “I never signed an act [before] if we didn’t break bread.” And amid fears that Covid-19 would have a lasting negative impact on the labels’ bottom line, Greenwald was instructed to “trim down the record company.”

Although she needed to cut costs, she was reluctant to fire staff during the pandemic. Instead, she went to her A&R department with a question: “Are there [artists] that we no longer should be in business with?” “Let’s make some tough decisions,” she remembered saying. “Because I always believed that if we couldn’t stand and believe in and back you 1,000%, we shouldn’t hold people just to hold people.” 

“Pink Pony Club” wasn’t taking off at the time, and Roan was among the acts that Atlantic dropped. She was subsequently picked up by Island Records and became one of the breakout stars of 2024, winning best new artist at the Grammy Awards in February. (This trajectory is more common than labels would like: Mars, for example, was dropped by Motown before he signed to Atlantic.)

What Greenwald called the “stand and believe” impulse has largely vanished from the major labels. “The last two years of my Atlantic run, I kept yelling at my A&R staff,” she said cheerfully. She described them as “under siege by data …  Everybody wants to hedge,” Greenwald added. “Nobody wants to just find something with one stream that’s brand spanking new and say, ‘I believe this is going to be somebody amazing.’”

She contrasted this approach with the behavior of young managers. Even though — or perhaps because — most of them have next to no experience in the music industry, Greenwald said, they find artists they like, long before their listening data is showing signs of exponential growth. Then they do something daring: “Call them up and say, ‘I believe.’” 

By the time those managers are across the table from Greenwald, their risky bet is about to pay off. “I’m sitting in a room talking to somebody who has no experience, and they’re going to decide whether or not this artist signs [to] Atlantic or RCA,” she continued. “I’m looking at my A&R people going, ‘How did this woman who was a telemarketer from Kentucky get to that act before you?’”

While Greenwald admired managers’ willingness to throw caution to the winds and commit fully to artists they love, she was less enamored with some of the management contracts she saw young acts signing. “I had to clean up a million contracts for some of my artists,” she said. “I was just paying advances to managers to get them out of these artists’ lives with the artists’ future money.” 

“It’s easy to say the label is the big bad guy,” she added later. “I always used to say, when I write my book, it’s going to be [called] ‘Why managers messed up the industry.’”

Major labels currently face a tough climate. That’s not because of TikTok’s outsized role in music discovery, or the threat of artificial intelligence, according to Greenwald. “People are not growing up anymore going, ‘I want to sign to Atlantic or Def Jam or Columbia or Interscope,’” she explained, hitting her palm for emphasis. “People are saying, ‘I want to make this shit on my own and I want to be independent.’” 

Now that Greenwald has some free time — a first after more than three decades in the music business — she has been asking herself, “What kind of company do I want to build now?” 

“To cut through and have a career, I think it’s about collaboration and having the right team,” she added. “Do you need 500 million people to do it? Not anymore.”