Empire
On Saturday, Feb. 15, Billboard and EMPIRE came together at EMPIRE’s San Francisco studios to celebrate Billboard’s second annual Sports and Music issue, honoring some of the most powerful people operating at the intersection of the industries of sports and music. The issue, which features EMPIRE founder/CEO Ghazi on the cover, as well as a […]
P-Lo stands under a basketball hoop on a rooftop outdoor court that overlooks downtown San Francisco, surrounded by the Bay Area Avengers — Saweetie, Larry June, Kamaiyah, G-Eazy, thuy, LaRussell and YMTK, all local MCs gathered to shoot the video for their new track “Player’s Holiday ’25.” The song is part of an upcoming project spearheaded by P-Lo and Golden State Entertainment (GSE), the record label and content division of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, which is planning to release the album in partnership with EMPIRE to celebrate the local music scene ahead of NBA All-Star Weekend in San Francisco in mid-February. The vibe on-set is breezy and free; the collection of talent, both on the song and hanging out here today, makes the afternoon feel like the modern-day, Bay version of the Great Day in Harlem celebrating the 1950s New York jazz scene.
“Just having all the creatives and artists in the Bay there for that and just being able to be present in that moment and really put that thing together to represent the Bay correctly [was special],” P-Lo says. “There’s been so much negative talk about San Francisco and Oakland [Calif.] and how dangerous it is, and all these bad things about our region and our area, and we wanted to just show the unity and our resilience to all of that.”
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All told, the album — called For the Soil — will feature over a dozen Bay Area artists, including icons like E-40 and Too $hort. It’s the latest project from GSE, which formed in 2022 with EMPIRE as its distribution partner and has released music by K-pop act BamBam and Oakland artist MAYZIN.
EMPIRE founder and CEO Ghazi and his company “have global reach but have maintained deep roots in and genuine love for the Bay,” says David Kelly, chief business officer for GSE and chief legal officer for the Warriors. “When Golden State Entertainment wanted to do something special in connection with NBA All-Star 2025 coming to the San Francisco Bay Area, it was only right that we linked up with P-Lo and release it via EMPIRE. The project is a celebration of Bay Area music and culture and a testament to the rich music scene that EMPIRE has helped create in and for the Bay.”
It’s also part of a suite of projects that EMPIRE is spearheading ahead of All-Star Week, including several parties in the area and a collaboration with NBA 2K for a limited-edition vinyl package featuring EMPIRE artists, on which “Player’s Holiday ’25” is also featured.
“Growing up a Warriors fan and going to the games all my life,” P-Lo says, “just to be able to work with a company that really is like one of the better franchises in all of sports, to be able to do something like this with them, is a dream come true.”
This story appears in the Feb. 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
It’s an early evening in late September, and San Francisco is gleaming. The back patio at EMPIRE’s recording studios near the city’s Mission District is all white marble, reflecting the last rays of the setting sun as dozens of YouTube executives mill about, holding mixed drinks and picking at passed trays of beef skewers, falafel, lamb dumplings, and ham and chicken croquettes. At the moment, the companies’ top executives — EMPIRE founder and CEO Ghazi, COO Nima Etminan and president Tina Davis, as well as YouTube global head of music Lyor Cohen, among others — are sequestered in the studio’s live room for a quarterly business review, discussing the platform’s new tools, the label’s upcoming projects and how the two can best work together. A cake is adorned with YouTube’s latest milestone: 100 million members of its music subscription service.
Inside, the aesthetic is flipped: Black walls, dark wood floors and a black marble bar set the tone, while a projection screen in the main lounge area shows photos of Nigerian superstar and recent EMPIRE signee Tiwa Savage, who is in town finishing her new album. As Ghazi, Cohen and the others wrap their meeting and begin to filter into the party, everyone is ushered inside to hear her play some of her new music.
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“This is my first project at EMPIRE, and it’s really emotional for me because I’ve never had a label be this invested; most labels are not in the studio with you from morning until night,” Savage says before introducing her first single from the album, “Forgiveness,” which she will release a couple of weeks later. “They made me feel so welcome. I’ve been signed several times, but I’ve never been in a situation where it felt like home.”
The next day, at a barbecue restaurant near the studio, Ghazi is reflecting on the event — and what the connection with YouTube’s Cohen means to him. “I used an analogy with Lyor: ‘This is not a full-circle moment; this is the Olympic rings of full-circle moments,’ ” he says. “This brings so many circles of my life into place. I started as an engineer; I’m in a state-of-the-art studio that I could only dream about that I built with my bare hands. I used to listen to Run-D.M.C. — he found Run-D.M.C. The first tape I ever bought was Raising Hell — now I’m raising hell in the music business.” He laughs. “I prefer to call it ‘raising angels,’ but it’s cool. And then you have a giant like him in the record business that people used to blueprint their careers after, and now he’s telling me that he’s proud of the success I’ve had and that he watched me build a legacy. That’s validation.”
For Ghazi, 48, validation has seemingly been everywhere of late. The company that he founded in 2010 as a digital distributor for his friends in the Bay Area hip-hop scene has grown into one of the most formidable and powerful companies in the global music business. It has a record label, publishing and content divisions, a merchandise operation and 250 employees around the world, with a presence on six continents and deep connections to the local culture, politics and sports, including the Golden State Warriors and the San Francisco 49ers.
And now, as EMPIRE turns 15, it’s coming off its best year yet: For 19 nonconsecutive weeks, spanning from mid-July to the end of November, EMPIRE artist Shaboozey held the top slot on the Billboard Hot 100 with “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” tying the record for the chart’s longest-running No. 1 — an enviable achievement for any label, but particularly for an independent without any outside investment or corporate overlords. Shaboozey landed five nominations at the 2025 Grammy Awards, including best new artist and song of the year, redefining what is possible for an indie act and company in the modern music business.
Even more notably, that success arrived during a year when all three major labels experienced a painful and layoff-heavy molting process, reorganizing themselves to emphasize speed, technology, artist services and distribution — or, to put it another way, to try to look a lot more like EMPIRE. (“I think the battleship has been observing the speedboat for quite some time,” Ghazi says.) Amid those changes in the business, a new school of thought has emerged: that success is often found in cultural niches that gain mainstream acceptance from the bottom up, not the top down. Ghazi embodies that change: He may not have the mainstream name recognition of his peers in New York or L.A., but in his force of personality — humble yet emphatic, as many successful founders are — and his tireless, globe-trotting pace, he fits right in among the elite movers and shakers of the business.
“This industry used to be full of super-colorful entrepreneurs that were focused on their art, and when you talked to them, they had a certain excitement and shine in their eyes. Unfortunately, there’s not that many of them [left],” Cohen says about Ghazi. “I would call him one of the few. A person that is committed to excellence, cares about the details, shows up, has continuity and he’s positive and enthusiastic.”
Hermès coat and shirt
Austin Hargrave
There’s another reason why the YouTube party held such significance for Ghazi: The video streaming service is another company born, bred and based in the Bay Area that grew into a music industry behemoth after being built on tech foundations. Ghazi worked in Silicon Valley, including at an ad-supported video streaming service half a decade before YouTube, prior to dedicating his life to music, first as a recording engineer and then at digital distributor Ingrooves. He then founded EMPIRE — and sees his company as part of that lineage. “I’ve never met a music exec that has such a grip on the three verticals — creative, business and technology — and is fluent in all of it and active in all of it,” says Peter Kadin, a major-label veteran who is now executive vp of marketing at EMPIRE. “Someone who can go from meeting with an engineering team about building out the future of our systems, to sitting with finance and going through our deal structures with all the major DSPs [digital service providers], to going to the studio at night and mixing a Money Man album. There is no other executive doing that.”
Ghazi’s tech background and San Francisco’s reputation as the center of the tech industry are among the many reasons why he has always maintained that EMPIRE will never leave the Bay. The area has been part of him since he grew up in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, during his days at San Francisco State, throughout his time in the trenches of the local hip-hop scene and even now, when he has the ear of the new mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie, whom he’s advising on cultural matters, and is working hand in hand with the NBA and the Golden State Warriors to produce events and release projects surrounding the upcoming NBA All-Star Weekend, which will be held in the Bay Area in February for the first time in 25 years.
But for a city that has had its share of big music moments and in which several major companies got their start, San Francisco’s music, and music tech, scenes have receded over the last two decades, with many companies lured away by the brighter lights and easier connections that exist in New York or Los Angeles. It’s a fate Ghazi is determined to avoid for EMPIRE — and a trend he’s actively working to reverse.
Ghazi likes to tell a story about when he was in his 20s in the early 2000s and mixed The Game’s first mixtape at San Francisco’s Hyde Street Studios. The project, which came out in 2004, ultimately helped Game get signed to Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Records, and when Dre and one of his executives heard the tape, they wondered who had mixed it because it sounded much more professional than the typical lo-fi promotional tapes making the rounds among underground hip-hop heads at the time. The guys invited Ghazi down to L.A. and encouraged him to move to the city and start working with them.
“I was flattered by it, but I was also furious — mad that I had to leave the Bay to build a music career,” he recalls. “I remember driving past the Capitol Tower like, people drive past this building and think, ‘I’m going to work there one day.’ And we don’t have that in the Bay. And I was like, ‘That sucks! I’m going to figure this s–t out!’
“It took me a long time — a really long time — but I figured it out.”
Prada coat, shirt, pants and shoes.
Austin Hargrave
“This might be the most mellow day I’ve had in three months.”
A few weeks later, Ghazi is driving through the streets of San Francisco, giving the signature tour of the city that he offers to anyone new in town — or anyone who may have only heard of its downtown blight and violence as depicted by the national news. It’s another beautiful fall day in the Bay, the first vintage weather after an extended heat wave, and he has cleared his schedule for the afternoon. For the next four hours, he unspools the history of the city neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street.
From the EMPIRE office in the Financial District, he drives into Chinatown, then to the Marina District and the picturesque Palace of Fine Arts. After that it’s into the Presidio, where Lucasfilm is headquartered, then over the Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito, stopping at an overlook for a view of the city. Then it’s back across the bridge into San Francisco, along Baker Beach into Sea Cliff and then Richmond District, the neighborhood where Ghazi lived in a 350-square-foot apartment when he was first dreaming up what would become EMPIRE. (“I had like four f–king jobs,” he says. “Some of the happiest times of my life, though. Some of the most stressful, but some of the happiest.”)
Along the way — passing through Lands End lookout point, Golden Gate Park, the Haight-Ashbury district and Billionaires’ Row, down the famously crooked Lombard Street and into the Mission — he calls out the landmarks of his life: the apartment where he was born, his first recording studio, the place he got his first boba milk tea, the theater where he used to watch movies for two dollars, the Haight storefront where he once co-owned a clothing store, the place where he and Etminan built the wiring for the first EMPIRE office through a hole in the wall. After a few hours, he parks near the water and gets out of the car to take it all in.
“They say San Francisco’s a doom loop,” he says, looking across McCovey Cove into Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, in the late-afternoon sun. “This look like a doom loop to you?”
Louis Vuitton sunglasses and jacket
Austin Hargrave
San Francisco is personal to Ghazi in a way that goes deeper than the typical nostalgia people feel for home. And the recent right-wing news coverage by 24/7 cable networks — which has portrayed the city as crime-ridden and drug-addled, overrun by a persistent homelessness problem that the city has not been able to handle — that has proliferated in recent years has spurred him and other music leaders in the city into action.
“San Francisco had such a heyday up until the pandemic, and it’s been really hard to watch the world s–t on our city,” says Bryan Duquette, founder of Another Planet Management and a member of the core executive team at Another Planet Entertainment, the San Francisco-based independent promoter that puts on the Outside Lands music festival and operates Bay Area venues including Berkeley’s Greek Theatre and San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Duquette, who has lived in the Bay for over 20 years, met Ghazi in 2023 and found a kindred spirit determined to rectify the negative perceptions held by outsiders. Last year, Another Planet teamed with Ghazi, EMPIRE and artist management company Brilliant Corners to assemble 100 members of the Bay Area music scene to meet with Lurie, then a mayoral candidate, to discuss his plan to reinvest in the artistic community. “Daniel really was trying to get to the people who were creating culture and helping the city become, again, what it was seen as globally,” Duquette says. “And Ghazi is a really big piece of that.”
Lurie’s outreach ultimately won him much of the creative community’s support, and in turn helped win him the election; he was sworn in as the 46th mayor of San Francisco in January. “The arts and culture have always defined us, and I firmly believe that EMPIRE and Ghazi are going to be part of the revitalization of our city,” Lurie says. “He knows what’s going on in the music world better than just about anybody, and I’ll be listening carefully to his guidance and his counsel.”
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and Ghazi in 2025.
Courtesy of EMPIRE
EMPIRE’s fierce independence, too, is an expression of the Bay’s ethos. “He’s a representative of the independent grind and the culture here; that’s something that everyone in the Bay can resonate with, just coming from the ground up and being the underdog,” says P-Lo, the Bay Area rapper who has been with EMPIRE since 2017. (P-Lo is spearheading a project with the Golden State Warriors’ content division, Golden State Entertainment, that will be released ahead of NBA All-Star Week and distributed by EMPIRE and will feature more than a dozen Bay Area artists.)
But that independence, and particularly the eye-opening success that EMPIRE has experienced over the past few years, has also brought scrutiny — and tests of Ghazi’s commitment, particularly during a time of intense consolidation in the music business. When a media report circulated in November 2023 positing that LionTree was lining up a $1.5 billion bid to buy EMPIRE — “Most believe Ghazi is not a seller, but big checks have changed other people’s minds,” the report needled — Ghazi was furious and sent a staffwide email emphatically denying it, according to multiple employees. A week after EMPIRE’s YouTube event, he was even more publicly defiant, insisting while onstage in October at the industry conference Trapital Summit in Los Angeles: “I’m not for sale. Period. I am dead serious. I am living my purpose. There’s no price on that.”
It’s a frustrating topic for Ghazi, not least because it implies a fundamental misunderstanding of who he is and why he does what he does. “You don’t understand — I just don’t care about money,” he says. “It’s not my motivation.” Instead he talks about the principles instilled in him by his father, a Palestinian refugee who brought his family to America to put them in a position to control their own paths if they were willing to work for it. “I don’t see myself ever working for somebody else,” Ghazi continues. “I’d rather retire. There’s no price for my autonomy. It’s the greatest gift to a leader.”
Still, his insistence on sole ownership — and the sheer force of personality that he exudes in binding the company together — has left enough of an opening for industry analysts to wonder about succession planning, about what might happen to the company when, or if, Ghazi decides to hang it up. He freely admits he won’t stick around as a hands-on CEO forever, but also that EMPIRE is about legacy for him and that he values legacy and autonomy — the freedom to chart his destiny — more than anything else. In that sense, he’ll never truly leave EMPIRE, even as the rumor mill keeps churning. “I always admired athletes who retired when they were on top. I want to be at the top of my executive game when I quit,” he says. “I don’t want to be the guy who hung on for too long. I’m already the owner, so I could still hang around as a chairman, but I don’t need to hang around as the guy running s–t day to day.”
Austin Hargrave
But that’s not happening anytime soon. In the past six months alone, EMPIRE has expanded into Australia, East Asia and South Africa and completed the acquisition of Top Drawer Merch to bring another monetization vertical into the fold for its artists. Ghazi is engaged in the industrywide debates surrounding superfandom revenue and is constantly seeking new opportunities; the two weeks prior to this driving tour, he had been in Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Cambodia, Singapore, Bali, San Francisco, Paris, Marrakesh, Singapore again, Seoul again, Las Vegas, Seattle and back to San Francisco: taking label meetings, shooting music videos, meeting with DSP partners, attending conferences and awards shows and directing work on the EMPIRE studios here, with the goal of expanding the company’s reach step by step — taking the stairs rather than the elevator, as he puts it.
“The goal is to be in all the places that make sense for us culturally,” he says. “Is the music interesting? Is the culture interesting? Holistically, how does it play with our DNA? What’s the cost of acquisition and retention? Do I like the music here? But the initial fuel is the passion; then, from there, start to figure it out.”
Joice Street is mobbed. The Nob Hill alley, around the corner from the Bruce Lee mural that adorns the wall next to the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum, is the location this afternoon for P-Lo’s “Player’s Holiday ’25” video shoot, and dozens of people, including some of the Bay’s biggest rappers — Saweetie, G-Eazy and Larry June among them — are filming on a basketball court on the roof of a building overlooking the city. Ghazi is there, not just because EMPIRE is distributing the song, which will appear on P-Lo’s album with Golden State Entertainment, but because he’s scheduled to make a cameo in the video.
Ghazi spends more than an hour on the rooftop, where he seemingly knows everyone — and everyone wants a minute of his time. But soon he heads back to the studio to return to work. The vibe there is low-key, but a typical cross section of artists and creatives are at work: Nai Barghouti, an Israeli-born Palestinian singer, flautist and composer, is in Studio C, working on songs for her new album before heading back out on tour; two producers from dance label dirtybird, which EMPIRE acquired in 2022, are in the live room, “ideating the next big hit of 2025”; a regional Mexican group sits on the patio outside, figuring out songs on a guitar; YS Baby from EMPIRE-owned viral content aggregator HoodClips (which has over 11 million followers) is talking about the podcasts he has lined up. Later, Japanese rapper-singer Yuki Chiba — whose 2024 collaboration with Megan Thee Stallion, “Mamushi,” reached No. 36 on the Hot 100 — takes over Studio A, where he plays a slew of songs slated for upcoming projects and discusses rollout plans.
EMPIRE may have gotten its start in Bay Area hip-hop and made waves on the front lines of West African Afrobeats, but these days it embodies the global outlook that Ghazi always envisioned; Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” after all, is a country crossover hit out of Nashville that reached No. 1 in 10 countries. EMPIRE partnered with Nashville-based indie promotion company Magnolia Music to handle its country radio campaign, and from there the single branched out to other formats, ultimately becoming the first song in history to go top 10 on four different Billboard airplay charts: country, top 40, adult top 40 and rhythmic. And Ghazi sees himself as a global citizen helping people around the world — “creating microeconomies” within the territories EMPIRE operates, he says — not just within the confines of the Bay Area.
Shaboozey and Ghazi at the 2024 CMA After Party.
Becca Mitchell
He is also the highest-profile Palestinian executive in the music business and has openly condemned the humanitarian crisis that has erupted during Israel’s war in Gaza. His Instagram profile picture is the Palestinian flag; he regularly shares videos and photos decrying the violence against civilians; he helped facilitate the remix to Macklemore’s track dedicated to Palestine, “Hind’s Hall,” and went to Seattle in October to support the rapper at a Palestinian benefit concert, despite Macklemore not being an EMPIRE artist. He stresses that he does this on a personal level, explicitly not to politicize the company. When asked if he feels a responsibility of sorts, given his profile, to help raise awareness about that humanitarian crisis, he simply says, “I feel like I want to be proud of the man in the mirror.” (“He’s Palestinian and I’m Israeli; we shared our great pain and anxiety over what’s happening in the Middle East,” says Cohen, who also calls Ghazi “a genuinely good guy.”)
But despite its global activities, EMPIRE has stayed focused on its local roots — and is continuing to strengthen them, too. In 2020, it started putting on the cultural festival 415 Day (which takes its name from a San Francisco area code) and has gotten further into live events through its deepening relationship with Another Planet. The San Francisco studio has become not just the creative center of EMPIRE’s operations but also an event venue for the city’s music and civic communities. And in a massive move in January, EMPIRE purchased the 100,000-square-foot historic Financial District building One Montgomery, built in 1908, for $24.5 million, according to The San Francisco Business Times; Ghazi plans to move the company headquarters there after renovating it. Eventually, One Montgomery could become the San Francisco version of the Capitol Tower that Ghazi envisioned all those years ago.
“There have been so many times that people have told him he couldn’t do something, and then he was able to do it, that it gave him all the fire and was the catalyst for him to be the person he is today,” says Moody Jones, GM of EMPIRE Dance, who has been with the company since 2018. “They told him he was crazy to have a music company in San Francisco; that he would never compete with a major; that he would never get out of hip-hop; that he would never open up a studio. They told him San Francisco would never be cool again. And every single time he was able to show them that, ‘No, I’m right.’ ”
That all builds into the larger cultural role Ghazi is playing in his city and beyond. Lurie just announced the inaugural San Francisco Music Week, a celebration of the city’s local music industry culminating in an industry summit with a keynote conversation with Ghazi. And while he says he’s not interested in San Francisco politics, he wants to be consulted from an advisory perspective on cultural events in the city and try to bring in more events beyond just music — Art Basel San Francisco is one that he has begun to advise on, though that project is currently on pause. He has worked with the city and the NBA on a slew of events around NBA All-Star Week and discusses the Super Bowl and World Cup in 2026 as further opportunities to showcase all that San Francisco has to offer. “For events like the NBA All-Star Game, Super Bowl LX, the World Cup, we get to show off all the greatness here, and Ghazi and EMPIRE and the artists they represent are part and parcel to what makes San Francisco so great,” Lurie says. “We need more Ghazis.”
Ahead of All-Star Week, he has made a series of moves and partnerships with the NBA and the Golden State Warriors, including with the game NBA 2K25, with which EMPIRE partnered for a first-of-its-kind deal that includes a limited-edition vinyl box set with 13 tracks by EMPIRE artists; EMPIRE artists on the game soundtrack; and Ghazi and some of EMPIRE’s artists scanned into the game itself. At the studio in September, he sat for an interview with NBA 2KTV host Alexis Morgan — who, to Ghazi’s delight, is also from the Bay Area — that will be part of NBA 2K25’s bonus features.
Ghazi (right) with NBA 2KTV’s Alexis Morgan.
Courtesy of 2K
But ultimately, it is all about the music. Shaboozey’s career is now in a superstar arc, and “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” will soon become EMPIRE’s fifth record with more than 10 million equivalent units in the United States according to Luminate, with over 1 billion on-demand streams. A few years ago, EMPIRE was flying largely under the radar, but Ghazi now has it at the top of its game, with a track record that speaks volumes in an industry based just as much on history as on what’s coming next.
“You always learn, all the time; you’re always adapting to what’s going on around you,” he says. “And sometimes you can’t believe how far you’ve come. But that only inspires you to go further.”
This story appears in the Feb. 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
Palestinian American producer DJ Habibeats has signed with San Francisco-based record label, publisher and distributor EMPIRE. The artist, who’s based in Los Angeles and grew up in the Bay Area in a family originally from Ramallah, Palestine, began producing dance music as a teenager. During his rise, he’s had residencies at venues throughout California and […]
EMPIRE is officially stepping into Asia as the powerhouse independent label announces the appointment an executive with a track record of fostering crossover talent. Known for being pivotal in developing several breakout Asian acts, Jeffrey Yoo has been appointed EMPIRE’s senior vp of East Asia, the company announced on Thursday (Oct. 31). The seasoned exec […]
G-Dragon is reclaiming the spotlight on his terms.
The K-pop icon’s first single in seven years, “POWER,” drops Thursday (Oct. 31) as part of a new partnership with his Korean agency, Galaxy Corporation, and EMPIRE, the major independent record label that boasts Shaboozey on its roster.
Known for shattering K-pop conventions and cracking the Billboard charts early in K-pop’s rise as both the leader of boy band BIGBANG and as a solo artist, G-Dragon’s unmistakable confidence — “Guess who’s back/It’s your boy, GD!” — kicks off the hip-hop-infused, high-energy anthem. The comeback cut was co-written by G-Dragon alongside Tommy “TB Hits” Brown, Theron Thomas and Steven Franks.
“‘POWER’ manifests the essence of music,” G-Dragon said in a statement. “I express myself through music. This marks the beginning of a new era and I hope to inspire people who listen to my music.”
“G-Dragon is a cultural force that has laid the foundation for K-Pop’s global dominance,” added Ghazi, founder/CEO of EMPIRE. “This partnership reinforces our mission at EMPIRE to work alongside artists that will shape the future of global music.”
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G-Dragon was signed to EMPIRE by the company’s newly appointed senior vp of East Asia, Jeffrey Yoo.
The signing with the indie label marks a new freedom for the Seoul superstar following his exit from longtime record label YG Entertainment (home to BLACKPINK, TREASURE and BABYMONSTER) last year after two decades.
During his time at YG, G-Dragon led BIGBANG in becoming the first K-pop act to land a Korean-language album on the Billboard 200 in March 2012. He’s also scored three solo entries on the Billboard 200 and held a record for the most entries on the tally among K-pop soloists for years; he now shares the record with BTS‘ RM and J-Hope. While his music career has led to collaborations with the likes of Diplo, Missy Elliot, Sky Ferreira, Skrillex and M.I.A., plus a placement on the 2023’s Elvis soundtrack, G-Dragon also became an integral figure in the fashion and art world with his streetwear brand PEACEMINUSONE along with campaigns with Chanel and Nike.
Looking ahead, the K-pop king will perform at the upcoming MAMA Awards in Japan on Nov. 23, marking his first performance in nearly a decade at the influential K-pop awards show. Earlier this month, Billboard also reported that Tencent Music Entertainment Group had partnered with Galaxy Corporation for his upcoming tour.
G-Dragon
Galaxy Corporation
EMPIRE president Tina Davis took part in a keynote conversation during ADE 2024, speaking before a crowded audience at the annual dance music industry conference in Amsterdam.
The Saturday (Oct. 19 )talk spanned many facets of Davis’ career, starting when she was a 25-year-old running the A&R department at Def Jam and taking the bus to work.
“I didn’t have a car. I was sitting in a bus going to work every day, running Def Jam on the West Coast, making pennies,” Davis said while talking about pursuing her career despite feelings of self-doubt. “I think it’s just all about how much you want it, how much drive [you have] and how much you believe in yourself. Even though you might doubt yourself, just try anyway.”
The conversation, moderated by journalist Pay Komüs, focused largely on Davis’ work as president of EMPIRE, a position she ascended to in the summer of 2023 after five years at the independent Bay Area-based label, publisher and distributor. The executive spoke about working on EMPIRE’S global business, the importance of authenticity for artists and how such authenticity helped Shaboozey become one of the breakout artists of 2024. The hip-hop/country artist signed to EMPIRE IN 2021, and three years later his hit single, “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” made him famous. The song is currently in its 15th week at No. 1 on the Hot 100.
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Davis was one of the thousands of industry executives who traveled to Amsterdam for ADE, which has already announced dates for next year’s event: Oct. 22-26, 2025. These are five key takeaways from her keynote.
Working Globally Means Working Collaboratively
With teams in the U.S., Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Davis stressed that it’s crucial that each territory takes the lead in its own decision-making. “We’re not in San Francisco telling the people in Africa, ‘This is how you need to do it,’ or telling [our team] here in Amsterdam, ‘You need to do it this way,’” she said. “We can’t tell you how it needs to be done. We have a structure in mind. We know how we like it. We know it’s about authenticity. We know it’s about being culturally significant. But for the most part, we make sure we work with the people we have in our company and take their advice, listen to them; they listen to us, and we work together as a strategy in everything that we do.”
Every Artist Is a Partner
“We don’t sign artists, we sign partners,” Davis said of bringing new acts onto the roster. “We look at them as partners. We look at their business and figure out how we can help them scale up, just as we’re doing for ourselves.” For this type of structure to work, Davis stressed that trust is essential to “make sure that relationship is strong. We want to make sure that our artists feel our presence, and they understand how much we care about their future.”
Artist Authenticity Is Crucial
EMPIRE, Davis said, “is a company that leans heavily on authenticity and culture. If you’re not true to yourself, you can’t be true to us, and you can’t be true to your consumer.” The company “isn’t against” artists who consistently change styles, she continued, “but at the same time, it’s sort of like, ‘Okay, is that really who you are?’ Let’s figure out how we can get a middle ground, or figure out how you can present yourself in a different way, but still not lose the fan base you have.’”
On The Success of Shaboozey — And the Patience Required to Get Him to This Point
Expanding on her thoughts on authenticity, Davis said that EMPIRE is “intricate when it comes to making sure the direction fits the talent.” She recalled that when Shaboozey was presented to the company, “he had wicks in his head, he’s a tall African American, and he came in doing country and hip-hop. Nothing really was working at that time. It had happened before, but nothing at that time was really at the top of the charts that sounded like him.”
But Davis says that when the team met him, they felt his authenticity. “So you can’t tell somebody that looks like that, ‘Hey, you’re not country. You can’t do country,’” she said. During the three years Shaboozey was signed to EMPIRE before blowing up, “we honed in and allowed him to just continue on his journey and keep growing. He was putting out music, and the first records and project did okay, but it took a minute for it to get to this point, and we had the patience for that.”
Artists Don’t Need a Major Label to Succeed
Davis questioned the need for artists to be on a major label to be successful, suggesting they shift their mindset about major label deals being essential — particularly when it comes to artists maintaining control of their masters by staying independent. “I cannot tell you why someone like Justin Timberlake still has a record deal at a major,” Davis observed. “It makes no sense. Mind you, his deal probably is a little bit better than most of the newer artists that are coming up, but it still makes no sense; he should be distributing himself. He could go on TuneCore and make a lot more money than he’d make with that major from that big check that they give him.
She continued that changing artists’ mentality around major label deals has been “a process. It’s been an old rule for years that only majors can break you, but Shaboozey shows you right now that you really don’t need a major.”
Not Paying Attention To What Other People Are Doing Can Be a Key to Success
Davis observed that you’ve “got to kind of have blinders on when you’re working on your own thing, when you’re focused on your own vision, when you’re trying to accomplish something. You can’t look to the side, because you’re going to lose a race. You have to stay focused and look at what you’re working on because you have to figure out how you make your lane in the highway where everybody is still driving in the same direction.”
She also emphasized EMPIRE’S position as an innovator and leader, continuing that other companies “look at us. They follow us. They’re all turning toward where we have always been. When they started hiring DEI departments, we didn’t need it. We were already diverse. When they were like, ‘We need more women.’ We were 51% women. We were like, ‘We don’t need to worry about that.’ We’re purveyors of taste. We’re leaders; we don’t like to follow.”
EMPIRE is not for sale, said company founder/CEO Ghazi at the Trapital Summit on Thursday (Oct. 3) in Hollywood.
While appearing on a panel titled “The Rise of Independent Music” at the inaugural edition of the conference, Trapital founder Dan Runcie played a short game of over/under with Ghazi, asking the EMPIRE head how many calls he’d recently received about selling the label/distributor.
“You run a music company that has done well from a business perspective and many companies that are your peers in this space are being acquired, they are selling, they are raising money,” Runcie said, adding that EMPIRE is an attractive company to acquire at the moment. He then asked Ghazi if he had received over or under four phone calls in the last 12 months poking around to see if he would sell or allow investment.
“I haven’t gotten any phone calls,” Ghazi said sternly to the audience. “Because everybody knows I’m not for sale. Period. I am dead serious. I am living my purpose. There’s no price on that.”
The declaration comes as independent music distributors like Stem, Downtown, ONErpm and Believe have begun fundraising and exploring acquisitions from major music companies and other investors. Earlier this year, Warner Music Group looked into acquiring Believe (talks between the two ultimately fizzled out) and later hired Goldman Sachs banker Michael Ryan-Southern to lead its search to buy a distributor.
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While EMPIRE would be an ideal acquisition target for the majors or private equity, Ghazi said that’s not an option.
“I’m one of the very few people that I don’t give a s— about money. I care about money that I can share with other people within the livelihood that I get to create,” Ghazi said at the one-day conference. “I used to tell people when I started EMPIRE, ‘I want to be the Robin Hood of the music business.’ And I think that I’ve stuck to my principles. People will always poke around and it never gets to me.”
Ghazi explained that he has brushed off any inquiries that have come his way and has tried to keep his eye on the prize. “We’re helping thousands of people. We’ve created micro-economies all across this planet we call Earth and, for me, there’s nothing more special than that,” he added.
The EMPIRE CEO’s declaration comes as client Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” continues its No. 1 streak on the Billboard Hot 100 with 12 weeks at the summit to date.
“Did you ever think that one of the biggest songs you would have would be a country song?” Runcie asked during the conversation.
“I didn’t think it wouldn’t be,” Ghazi responded. The CEO went on to explain that about five years ago, EMPIRE set out to find stars and that in every genre they explored — including hip-hop, country and Afro music — they found someone special. “A lot of it just has to do with having the right taste, your thumb on the pulse and approaching the culture with understanding what they’re trying to do,” he said.
Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” updates a long-standing country music tradition — drowning one’s sorrows in whiskey — by way of J-Kwon’s 2004 rap hit “Tipsy.” The first time the singer played it for his label, EMPIRE, one question was top of mind for those in attendance: “Everybody was like, ‘When are you going to country radio?’” recalls EMPIRE CEO Ghazi.
In Ghazi’s view, that was a “very limited” plan. He had a more ambitious one: Push the song to multiple formats simultaneously. “For a record like that,” he says, “it’s a no-brainer.” Shaboozey released “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” in April; within a month, EMPIRE was promoting it to five different segments of the airwaves.
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Radio promotion is traditionally expensive, which is why it’s one of the last frontiers in the music industry that is still dominated by the major labels. Yet “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” released by an independent, recently became the first single in history to crack the top 10 on Billboard’s Country Airplay, Pop Airplay, Adult Pop Airplay and Rhythmic Airplay charts. (Adult pop is like regular pop but more sedate, while rhythmic usually mixes rap, R&B and some dance music; the rankings are based on airplay from a panel of stations in each format.)
“It’s important that Shaboozey has been able to show that you can do that as an independent artist,” says Heather Vassar, senior vp of operations for EMPIRE in Nashville. “We had several offers from majors who wanted to work the record, and it was really important that we were able to stay true to how we operate” — and scale the charts without their help. All that airplay counts towards the Hot 100, which Shaboozey has topped twice in non-consecutive weeks; notably, when “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” rebounded to No. 1 on the latest ranking, it was down in streams and sales, but up 11% in radio audience.
Songs that do well in multiple spaces on the airwaves usually unite coalitions of similar-minded formats. Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” and The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” for example, both hit No. 1 at pop, adult pop and adult contemporary. “Typically pop will share a lot with adult contemporary,” says Tom Poleman, chief programming officer at iHeartMedia. “It’s a similar group [of listeners], just an older demographic.”
The biggest R&B hits, however, tend to amass a different base of support. Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams and T.I.’s “Blurred Lines” and Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together,” both massive radio hits, reached No. 1 at adult R&B, mainstream R&B/hip-hop, rhythmic and pop.
EMPIRE, which has been traditionally strong in hip-hop and Afrobeats, will often promote songs to mainstream R&B/hip-hop, rhythmic and pop, according to Ghazi. But Shaboozey’s combination of formats is unusual. Only 13 songs have ever appeared on all four of the charts where he is now romping inside the top 10.
Country radio in particular has faced criticism in recent years for being unwilling to support songs by women or Black artists. Despite this history, 30 stations played “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” in April before EMPIRE sent the track to country programmers on May 3. “The streaming numbers were undeniable, but I was wondering how long it would take to convince a terrestrial country radio program director” to play the track, says Johnny Chiang, lead programmer for country music at SiriusXM and Pandora. “I am pleasantly surprised that they got it pretty quick.”
EMPIRE brought in Magnolia Music, an indie promotion company that has worked with the singer Randy Houser, to handle its country radio campaign. “Country radio, respectfully, always wants loyalty from artists,” Vassar says. “There was curiosity — is this one-and-done? Is Shaboozey going to go elsewhere [and stop paying attention to country radio] after this?”
Not everyone was concerned, though. For Tim Roberts, Audacy’s vp of country, Shaboozey “was already accepted by a bunch of country artists, so it just seemed natural” to play him. He first learned about “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” from a DJ who told him it was filling the floor at Coyote Joes, a country nightclub outside of Detroit, where Roberts also serves as a brand manager for WYCD. Two Audacy stations, KMLE and WPAW, were among the first prominent supporters of the song.
To quell other programmers’ anxieties, EMPIRE played them the rest of Shaboozey’s album, which has plenty of country signifiers, from pedal steel guitars to a sample of a horse neighing. In addition, Vassar says, the label introduced the singer to programmers when they were able to, “so they can understand the world that he’s building.” Roberts met Shaboozey the week of the Academy of Country Music Awards; the singer Jelly Roll brought him out during a performance at Billy Bob’s.
After EMPIRE officially started pushing “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” to country radio in May, 43 more stations threw it into their playlists immediately, including 38 owned by iHeartMedia. The format accounts for more than 20% of the single’s airplay so far, second only to top 40.
Shaboozey’s efforts to conquer pop and adult pop were aided by the fact that those formats have been more receptive to country songs recently — last year, Luke Combs’ “Fast Car” and Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” both crossed the divide. That sound “has been working at the top 40 format,” says Matt Johnson, program director for WPLW. “And when you combine that with a feel-good song as the weather is getting sweltering, that’s a recipe for a summertime hit.”
iHeartMedia felt similarly. “We got really aggressive at pop on that song because we saw it taking off,” Poleman says. Pop stations now account for more than 40% of Shaboozey’s airplay.
While there has been common ground recently between country and pop-adjacent formats, it’s still rare for country and rhythmic stations to share tracks. “Sometimes programmers follow the rulebook too much where it’s like, ‘This song doesn’t fit the normal criteria of what a rhythmic record should sound like,'” acknowledges Jonathan Steele, brand manager for KKFR in Phoenix. “I listen to everything and ask, is this going to alienate our audience? With Shaboozey, I knew my audience was going to get that hook stuck in their head.”
The rhythmic format was slower to welcome “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” relative to country and pop. But the track kept showing up on Shazam charts in places like Columbus, Ohio, where Chris Harris oversees WCKX, another rhythmic outlet. He started playing Shaboozey’s single in May, and he now has his eye on another alcohol-fueled country-rap fusion, Moneybagg Yo’s “Whiskey Whiskey,” a collaboration with Wallen.
Harris also “took a gamble” at his mainstream R&B/hip-hop station, WIZF, and added “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” there recently. “We got a great response,” he says. But this is the one format EMPIRE targeted where “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” has faltered, failing to get near the upper reaches of the chart.
Still, “Next week, we should be top five at four formats,” Ghazi says. “I’m going to take a stab at going No. 1 at all four. Why not?”
The year so far has served up a number of intriguing new artist stories, with the likes of Benson Boone, Chappell Roan and Tommy Richman soaring to the top region of the charts for the first time. But perhaps no artist has had a more historic rise in 2024 so far than Shaboozey, whose “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” became his first-ever No. 1 song on the Hot 100 this week — a huge achievement for the artist, his team and his label partner, EMPIRE.
The achievement comes more than a month after the release of Shaboozey’s latest album, Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going, which debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200, easily the best mark of his career. But its significance goes well beyond that. After two guest spots on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album helped introduce him to a mainstream audience, Shaboozey released “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and saw it become the first song in history to reach the top 10 of the Country, Pop, Adult Pop and Rhythmic Airplay charts — a true testament to its cross-genre, or even genre-less, appeal — while making him the first Black man, and second Black artist overall after Beyoncé earlier this year, to top both the Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs charts.
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It’s also a big milestone for EMPIRE, which launched its Nashville division in 2019 and started working with Shaboozey a few years ago. After releasing his Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die album in October 2022, EMPIRE threw the weight of the company behind the singer, bringing in the full force of its marketing, A&R and global teams, as well as devising the radio strategy that helped to deliver such a historic result. And the achievement helps make EMPIRE COO Nima Etminan Billboard’s Executive of the Week.
Here, Etminan, who alongside company founder/CEO Ghazi has built EMPIRE into an indie powerhouse for more than a decade now, talks about the company-wide strategy to help boost Shaboozey’s work, as well as what the recent achievements for his music mean for the industry and for EMPIRE itself. “We’re scratching the surface of an artist with immense talent, depth and longevity,” Etminan says of Shaboozey. “He’s got stories to tell, emotions to share and hearts to touch. I believe that we will be seeing him play arenas across the globe for many years to come and I’m excited to be there for it every step of the way.”
This week, Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” reached No. 1 on the Hot 100. What key decision did you make to help make that happen?
Shaboozey’s project has been an “all hands on deck” experience at EMPIRE. A key decision was to involve every department in every territory early on — they all played a role in this record in one way, shape or form. It’s hard to pinpoint specific decisions with a song this big; it’s a culmination of efforts.
This is Shaboozey’s first No. 1 single, after you guys have spent the past few years working with him. How have you helped him develop to get to this point, and how did you help push the song to these heights?
We saw potential in Shaboozey since our first meeting with him. He was passionate, talented and had a clear vision of what he was trying to achieve, but was still navigating his path to success in this industry. One of the key decisions was made after the release of Boozey’s first album with EMPIRE called Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die — he and his manager Abas Pauti called me in late 2022 trying to figure out next moves and we decided to bring him closer into the core EMPIRE umbrella. His potential as a global star was starting to be apparent and we brought in marketing and A&R resources from our San Francisco headquarters to complement what our Nashville team was doing on the ground. We strategized closely with his managers Abas and Jared [Cotter] and the upward curve began with the release of “Let It Burn” in the fall of 2023. It became clear we had something very special on our hands and the building started to rally around him.
This achievement also comes five years after EMPIRE launched its Nashville division. How have you built up and grown that aspect of the business, and how do you continue to support it moving forward?
Our Nashville division got its start somewhat serendipitously in 2019 with Willie Jones. Willie was not active at the time and didn’t have any music outside of an old X Factor audition video that had went viral some years back. He was a Black country artist with an incredible voice and Ghazi and I decided to take a chance and do a deal with him. From there, we started to assemble a staff on the ground and slowly made a name for EMPIRE in Nashville — brick by brick. Ghazi firmly believed that country music was going to follow in urban music’s footsteps with just a few years’ delay — and he was right. The town was ripe for new energy and we were quickly able to sign an impressive roster of artists and developed some amazing talent on both the record and the publishing side. We’ve been pushing Nashville for five years and are planning on continuing to do so.
Shaboozey is the first Black man, and second Black artist overall after Beyoncé earlier this year, to top both the Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs charts. What is the significance of that for you guys and for him?
It’s a sign of the times — genres are merging, styles are blending and the audience’s music taste is broader than ever. Artists don’t need to be put in boxes — whether it be by race, genre or eras. Good music is good music and the listeners largely get to dictate the charts.
The song is the first in history to reach the top 10 of the Country, Pop, Adult Pop and Rhythmic Airplay charts. What was your guys’ radio strategy?
There were many, many doubters of our ability to work this record at radio. The industry loves telling independents that there’s a ceiling to what they can do on their own and this was no different. We were told it can’t be done, and as we like to do, we proved them wrong. We’ve assembled a fantastic team that we had full faith in — and they delivered.
This achievement is also a capstone for an incredible first half of the year for Shaboozey overall, with his two guest spots on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and the No. 5 debut of his own album, Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going. How do you push things forward from here?
As cliche as it may sound, this is just the beginning for Shaboozey. The album has a lot of life left in it and some incredible songs that we will work. We’re scratching the surface of an artist with immense talent, depth and longevity. He’s got stories to tell, emotions to share and hearts to touch. I believe that we will be seeing him play arenas across the globe for many years to come and I’m excited to be there for it every step of the way.
You’ve been with Ghazi basically since the beginning of EMPIRE, helping to build this company. What does it mean for you guys to achieve this No. 1?
My path started in hip-hop. I started off as a fan of rap music in Germany, where I grew up, launching DubCNN, a platform focused specifically on West Coast hip-hop. That is what brought me to California, building friendships with some of my favorite artists growing up, and meeting Ghazi in 2008 via Daz Dillinger. My only goal at the time was to find a way to make a decent living doing something in music. No. 1 Billboard records were not on my radar — I liked underground music and I loved to help new artists gain an audience. But I saw the potential of what were doing when I watched Kendrick Lamar go from an unknown mixtape artist when I first interviewed him in 2007, to becoming a household name after his EMPIRE-released Section.80 and ultimately the biggest rapper in the world.
Ghazi and I share a passion for culture, authenticity and doing good business. What matters the most to us is doing things with integrity and leaving a legacy behind that we can be proud of. There’s a lot of foolishness that goes on in this industry; I’ve seen it from afar and I’ve experienced it firsthand. If we weren’t going to do it our way, we’d rather not do it at all. Shaboozey’s success is exactly that. He’s been through the major system, he’s seen behind the curtain, and partnering with someone like him, who shares similar values and ethics, and taking a record all the way to the top is extremely gratifying. However, I’d be lying if I said it was a goal I thought about or set out to achieve — I never chased awards, charts or any sort of outside validation. But I’m grateful for it when it happens.