From the Desk Of
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Artist development isn’t dead, but it sure has changed. Two decades ago, a 20-something jazz musician named Norah Jones became a breakout star for Blue Note Records, a traditional route to stardom when people still bought CDs and social media didn’t exist. Last year’s breakout jazz artist, Laufey, cultivated a fan base on TikTok and posts sheet music for her songs online so fans can download it before the recordings come out.
To AWAL CEO Lonny Olinick, Laufey’s success is a sign of the times. The Icelandic singer built an online following by herself, but she needed a team to develop her career and handle marketing and promotion logistics. Her second AWAL album, Bewitched, topped Billboard’s Jazz Albums and Traditional Jazz Albums charts in September. “We’re seeing this real inflection point where artists are starting to, with their own teams and then between the team and AWAL, realize that there are no barriers in what can be achieved,” says Olinick, who earned an MBA from Stanford Business School and worked at consulting firm Bain & Company before joining Kobalt in 2016.
Artists such as JVKE, whose “Golden Hour” reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2022, and Mercury Prize winner Little Simz have used AWAL to find success outside of the major-label system. AWAL’s services-focused approach is becoming the norm as major labels increasingly provide distribution, marketing, promotion, accounting and even financing without needing to own the rights to artists’ recordings as part of standard deals. Sony Music acquired AWAL in 2022 to complement its labels and its distribution business, The Orchard. Universal Music Group is also building its own artist services business, through a revamped Virgin Label Group.
A pingpong table that Olinick says “we have artists sign when they’re in the L.A. office.”
Maggie Shannon
Paradoxically, services-based music companies still have to do many of the same things as traditional labels — just with different deals. Only recently, Olinick says, has the 16-year-old company truly met that challenge. “Last year and the year before were probably the first years where we fully realized that vision, where I’m confident that we can do all of the things that exist in the traditional world.”
Most people in the music industry understand record labels and distributors, but services-based companies are a bit harder to get. How would you describe AWAL to the uninitiated?
The most important part of music in my mind is artist development. You try to find artists who have great music, compelling stories and a work ethic and try to help them forge their own path. And throughout history, the best artists have been artists who don’t fit in a box, and the path that they take is completely bespoke. And you can’t do it again the same way. What we’ve tried to do is build a company that’s the best in the world at doing that — at finding outlier artists who have great stories to tell and helping them grow. You need a great marketing team, a great digital marketing team, radio, synch and branding — all the things that exist in the traditional world. What we’ve tried to do is build a company that can do all those things, just with a different business model to keep the economics in favor of the artist.
You don’t have an everyone’s-welcome model — you choose who you want to work with. How do you do that?
We’re very opinionated about music. It’s really important as a company to have that creative, A&R-driven aesthetic. There’s three dimensions to it in my mind. There’s the music: Does the music speak to people? Two, is there a story to be told, and does this person want to communicate something beyond just the music that’s interesting and compelling? And three, does the person have a work ethic? Being successful in music requires relentlessly hard work on all sides.
“I love art of all types and take a lot of inspiration from culture,” Olinick says. “These books cover amazing music, art and sneaker culture.”
Maggie Shannon
Tell me about the staff on the creative side, as well as the administrative one.
We do everything, but the majority of our staff is focused on A&R, marketing and creative. That’s where we think we can be different and where we can help our artists tell stories. There’s 180 people across 14 offices. It’s run as a global company. If we find a record in Sweden, the U.S. company can jump on it, or the U.K. company or the Canadian one. Everyone is working collaboratively to try to do the best they can for the artist. And in each of those offices, we have traditional marketing, digital marketing, synch, brand partnerships, publicity — we basically do everything that an artist needs largely in-house. And then to the extent that we feel like we need something beyond what our 180 people can do, we will partner.
What’s the financial commitment when you work with an artist? Are you always writing a check?
It depends. Some of the deals are unfunded. We’re fortunate to be a part of Sony, so if it makes sense and we believe in the opportunity, there’s no check we couldn’t write if it made sense. But each deal is bespoke for the artist. We try to put as much money into marketing as we possibly can because we believe that that’s the thing we can do that hopefully makes a difference.
This “thing with eyes is something my son made for me,” Olinick says. The feeling of being watched “keeps me motivated every day. The small trophy is from our office awards for ‘Person on the Phone the Most.’ I take great pride in that.”
Maggie Shannon
Sony acquired AWAL in 2022 and it already owned The Orchard. How do the two work together?
The whole Sony ecosystem makes a ton of sense, and AWAL and The Orchard are great examples of that. The Orchard is best in class at supporting record companies. And if you look at the scale at which they operate, and the quality of what they do on behalf of labels, there’s just no one who’s doing that kind of work. It’s an incredible team led by Brad [Navin] and Colleen [Theis], who are just incredible executives. I look at us in a very similar way: the best at doing artist development in this nontraditional way. Being able to work together on tools and distribution is a great advantage for our clients and for The Orchard’s clients.
Some artists have gone from majors or big indies to AWAL, including Nick Cave, Cold War Kids and Jungle. Have some artists gone from AWAL to majors?
Our job is to develop the best artists in the world. And I think if we do that — especially if we do that at any scale — there’s going to be certain artists where the deal offered by a major is really compelling. Early on, we saw a lot more artists who would migrate and go do another deal. We developed Steve Lacy, Omar Apollo and Kim Petras — artists who have gone on and had real success at majors.
“The Marshall cabinet is actually a refrigerator,” Olinick says. “My office tends to have items from our artists, but the exception is that Beatles collectible — I don’t have anything to do with The Beatles, but it reminds me to aspire to work with the greatest artists.”
Maggie Shannon
You’ve had some time to integrate into Sony. How has being part of this larger company changed your life as a CEO?
Anytime you go into these things you have aspirations for what it will be. At the same time, [merger and acquisition] deals tend not to be what you expected them to be. People think that I’m sometimes saying the company line, and it couldn’t be further from the truth: The experience has been phenomenal. That comes down to two dimensions. Rob [Stringer, Sony Music CEO] is just an incredible music executive who comes from an A&R perspective. Being a part of a company where he sets the tone that music is at the center of everything you do has made us a better company. And because of that, it has basically been, “Here’s all these resources that Sony has that you can take advantage of, but continue to run the company the way you have because we’ve had tons of success doing it.” It has all been additive.We have more resources to invest. We have better technology. We can partner with Sony in certain markets where it makes sense. We’re out there building local businesses in Spain, Brazil, Nigeria and India. The Sony team has been incredibly supportive. Everyone sees that this is a meaningful part of the business and because AWAL is so music-centered and so is Sony, there’s just a lot of mutual respect and collaboration. It has been nothing short of reenergizing in an already energized business.
The music business is undergoing some contraction with layoffs and consolidation. Do you foresee laying people off, or are you hiring?
We’re actively hiring. We hired a head of hip-hop and R&B last year in Norva Denton. We hired a senior vp of A&R in Chris [Foitel]. We hired Cami [Operé], who’s our publicist. We just hired a new CFO [Sumit Chatterjee]. We’ve hired in Spain, Brazil and Nigeria. We bought a company in India [digital distribution firm OKListen]. So, we’re actively in the market because the business continues to grow. We had our best year last year; we’ll have our best year this year.
As the son of veteran agent Dennis Arfa, whose clients include Billy Joel, Metallica, Def Leppard and Rod Stewart, Jarred Arfa felt the pull of the entertainment business early on but wanted to make his own mark. And though he joined the family business, Artist Group International (AGI) — after a stint at Robert F.X. Sillerman’s licensing and rights company, CKX — he didn’t quite follow in his father’s footsteps, choosing to focus on agency management and business strategy instead of the day-to-day work of an agent.
In June, those responsibilities doubled when Jarred, 39, was promoted to executive vp/head of global music at Independent Artist Group (IAG), the talent firm formed when billionaire Ron Burkle’s The Yucaipa Companies merged AGI and the Agency for the Performing Arts, more commonly known as APA. (Yucaipa purchased AGI in 2012 and had been financing APA since 2020.)
The combined agencies now represent approximately 400 acts — a big jump from the 270 or so on AGI’s premerger roster — now that APA’s artists — among them, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige, Lauryn Hill, Ne-Yo, Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington, Cypress Hill and D’Angelo — have been folded into the mix.
That said, Jarred points out that “my role isn’t just signing clients, it’s signing agents” and growing the business as a whole. He also oversees the music division’s day-to-day operations and continues to work with his father, who is now IAG’s music division chairman. (Both manage Joel.)
Jarred, who lives with his wife and son in Manhattan, spoke to Billboard about the changes he has made at the agency. He also sized up his main competition and weighed in on WME and CAA agents’ dissatisfaction with their treatment after their companies’ initial public offering (IPO) and sale, respectively.
How did the IAG deal come together?
[Yucaipa co-founder and managing partner] Ron Burkle made an investment in APA during the pandemic. Frankly, we were not interested in them at first. The way their music department was run was not the way we ran ours, but I also saw they had some nice pieces of business. We met with Jim Osborne, who’s now [IAG] CEO, and we were really impressed by what he did with 50 Cent and Mary J. Blige — reinvigorating their brands through film and TV and how that enhanced their touring. So we started very organically. We decided not to commingle our music departments, but we had some artists interested in film and TV and started working with projects for Jane’s Addiction and Ghost. Eventually, we became agreeable to doing something bigger with APA if they handed the reins over to us in music. We merged, and Jim and Ron bet on me as the guy to help clean up their current music business in terms of who to keep and who not to keep.
How did Yucaipa’s culture affect IAG?
Their mantra has always been to let entrepreneurs be entrepreneurs and stay hands-off in the running of the business. We have one person from Yucaipa who works with us on a day-to-day basis, and then we go direct to Ron for bigger-picture things. When we sold the business to Yucaipa in 2011, I was still in my 20s, and I never felt he judged me by age. It was simply, “Are you smart? Can you get the job done?” If you deliver for him, you continue to rack up credibility. If I email him on something work-related, I’ll usually get a response quickly. It’s incredible, honestly, to have access to someone at that level.
How many clients does the company currently oversee?
In terms of touring, we have over 400 clients. That said, there were another 400 that were cut from the roster. We scrapped APA’s territorial system — which revolved around adult contemporary [acts] — and parted with some of the people in that model that didn’t work with our culture. We shifted some of the workforce and resources to where they were needed, which was their thriving urban department.
AGI was a music-first booking agency. How has merging with an agency involved in branding, film and TV benefited your roster?
Initially, [our music focus] served us well. We got a lot of clients who were promised the world by the major agencies, and when nothing was delivered for them, they’d come to us and say, “At least we know you’ll handle our touring well.” At the same time, it made it difficult to attract younger clients who were looking for [film/TV opportunities] and hoping for a branding deal. We need those other assets now to get us in the room for touring, which the APA partnership unlocks for us. And then we show them how much of a difference we can make on the touring side.
You have said that one of your most important responsibilities at AGI is to “stay neutral.” What does that mean?
It means I’m totally neutral when it comes to how we use our resources. A lot of times when we do sign an artist and I’m involved in the signing, I’m the one deciding which agent makes the most sense for the project because I’m the most versed in our agents’ skill sets and which one’s personality type suits the artist.
Billy Joel’s Madison Square Garden residency was a huge success. How will its completion affect business?
Nothing in our strategy changes. Obviously, you can never replace a once-in-a-lifetime-caliber artist on the level of Billy Joel, but as he recently said, he plans to continue to work after his residency at MSG is complete. We also have many other arena and stadium headliners.
How does IAG stack up against a competitor like Wasserman Music?
They’ve inherited a very strong music business. I think the problem they have — and they can dismiss it all they want, but it’s the same problem we had at AGI — is that they’re attached to a sports business. They don’t have the traditional film and TV core that is so important to so many of our artists. That’s an impediment.
Both WME and CAA have come under fire for how employees were treated during WME’s second IPO and CAA’s sale to Artemis. Agents at both firms were extremely disappointed with the amount and value of the shares they received. What’s your take?
First, I want to acknowledge that CAA’s $7 billion valuation is amazing for the agency business. As far as taking care of their people, when it comes to bonuses, I’ve always believed in the split model because there’s no arguments at the end of the day. The agent knows, based on a set formula, what they’re going to earn. There’s no gray area to be worked out, and that leads to a lot less headaches come those year-end conversations.
You’ve been public about your support of Ticketmaster. What is the government doing wrong in its constant probing of the ticketing space?
They should be focusing on the secondary market. That’s where the real problem lies. But they get lobbied hard by companies like StubHub. As agents, the best we can do is get as much of the high-end revenue for our artists that otherwise would go to the secondary market while keeping enough tickets available at affordable prices. Ticketmaster tools like Dynamic and Platinum are very helpful.
Do you think programs like Verified Fan are here to stay?
As much as I like Ticketmaster programs, this is the one that I don’t think works. Look at the backlash from Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen fans. Ticketmaster is making people take an extra step, and in exchange, the fans believe they’ll get a ticket at a fair price — neither of which is necessarily true. Verified Fan creates this false hope for the fan, and while the intention is noble, it ends up creating a lot more frustration than reward.
How often do you communicate with your father on agency business?
We speak a couple of times a day about what’s going on in his artist world and what his needs are. I would say we spend at least one phone call a day talking about Billy Joel and strategy. It is always a lot of fun.
When you two get together for family events, do you talk business?
It’s a blend. We could be talking about my son for one minute, then it goes back to the business. Then we talk about sports, and it’s back to business again.
Suhel Nafar understands the impact that music can have around the world.
Born in Lod — a city about 25 miles from Jerusalem — to Palestinian parents, Nafar learned English by listening to Dead Prez, 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G. The influence of these artists was so strong that in the late 1990s, he — along with his brother Tamer Nafar and their friend Mahmoud Jreri — started the first Palestinian hip-hop group, DAM.
“Listening to hip-hop and seeing music videos of artists being chased by police and feeling their oppression and their anger without knowing what they were talking about because I didn’t speak English — I felt they were talking about me,” Nafar tells Billboard over Zoom from Lod in late October.
He spent 20 years touring the world with DAM, whose lyrics focused on such topics as inequality and oppression. Through his travels, he saw a need in the market and is now working behind the scenes to fill it.
“There aren’t enough of us,” Nafar says, “Arabs, Muslims, brown people and people of color in the music industry to support the artists in the region and around the world.”
Nafar started working on videos, films and other jobs that focused on artists in the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region, which includes the Middle East, and helped its music scene coalesce. He moved to the United States in 2013 and taught as an artist in residence at New York University and, in 2018, began a three-year stint at Spotify. There, he helped establish WANA content on the platform and worked in its artist and industry partnerships division.
As vp of strategy and development at EMPIRE, where Nafar started in early 2021, he is leading the company’s expansion into the WANA region, which is rich with talent. Nafar says the generation of musicians he is fostering can help heal “the wound” inflicted by the conflicts there and their far-reaching repercussions.
He sees “glocalization” — global music genres such as pop and hip-hop adapted to WANA cultures — as the ideal delivery system and cites “Rajieen,” a direct response to the crisis featuring 25 WANA artists as an example. Nafar says the song and its powerful video have reached almost 10 million streams across all platforms.
What is EMPIRE’s West Asia and North Africa strategy?
I decided to move to EMPIRE because I felt that the technology of Spotify is great but that artists needed more behind-the-scenes support. [I needed] to be closer to artists and work with them on strategy. As a person that had the artist background, the [digital service provider] background and the content creation background, I thought I would help artists more from the label side.
At EMPIRE, I handle the strategy and development for the region. It means working with a lot of artists on signings and signing labels as well. I’m also developing the market. There’s a gap [in the WANA region] because we don’t have enough people behind the scenes. We don’t have enough managers. We don’t have enough labels.
How does EMPIRE’s independent approach to business influence your efforts?
My whole idea was how I could create a more independent mentality for others so that they could create their own EMPIREs and build their own rosters and executive teams. We signed a lot of labels from the region, along with good people who love music and are just missing skills, or people who have the skills but are missing people to be on their team. We’re providing this infrastructure to a lot of people here.
You’re saying that you’re building the industry itself, to a certain extent.
It’s supporting to amplify what’s already there more than building, I would say.
Nafar says he received this relief of Handala, a national symbol of the Palestinian people, “from a group of kids who attended one of my music and film workshops,” which he conducted in impoverished neighborhoods and refugee camps in Palestine.
Amir Nafar
What have been your biggest successes so far?
The number of female artists we have is amazing. We had at least four Arab female artists on Spotify’s Times Square billboard. My team and I are supporting voices of females from Morocco, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and the diaspora. This type of excitement inspires other female artists to grow. I’m really proud of that.
Who are some Arab artists you’re most excited about?
Maro is a half-Lebanese, half-Ukrainian artist who speaks Arabic, English, French, Ukrainian and Russian and can sing in every language. He was raised in Beirut, where he grew up playing guitar in the streets as a busker. When there was violence in Lebanon, he had to move to Norway … We got an opportunity to bring him to the U.S., where he’s living now.
What about hip-hop artists?
MC Abdul, a 15-year-old kid from Gaza, is a genius who started rapping when he was 9. He learned English from hip-hop and speaks it better than a lot of Americans I know. A few months ago, we finally got him out of Gaza and flew him and his dad to San Francisco on an artist visa. He performed an amazing show there for over 20,000 people. He was in the studio and taking meetings to start his album rollout and was supposed to come back to Gaza [a few] weeks ago. Then the whole situation started, so he couldn’t go back to his family.
Another artist I love is Soulja, a rapper from Sudan. When the war in Sudan happened, we had to help him escape from Sudan to Egypt, and now he’s in Saudi Arabia. His recent release, “Ayam,” is a breakup song where he’s telling his love he doesn’t want to see her anymore, but his love is actually Sudan. He wrote it the day he escaped and was almost killed.
Name one of the women artists you’re supporting.
Nai Barghouti is another amazing artist. She’s a traditional Palestinian folk artist who recently did a song with Skrillex, “Xena.” Her vocal skills are unbelievable. Sometimes we’re like, “Are you human?” Because sometimes it feels like her voice is just an instrument. We’re working on a few projects with her.
Developing Arab artists and promoting the region globally must feel like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
There are people who’ve been in this field before me that did a lot of great work and other cultures that inspired us a lot. My days at Spotify inspired me so much because I worked closely with the Latin team, the Afro team, the Desi team. I watched how K-pop started from the early stages. I just localized what I learned from all those different cultures.
Amir Nafar
How have things shifted since the recent conflict started? What are your workdays like?
Artists are not feeling like they want to release music. That’s the biggest hit. The department I’m running [went from releasing] at least 20 songs a week to almost no songs. The first week, it was the shock of “What the fuck is going on?” and then canceling shows. A lot of festivals all around the Arab world were canceled.
As an artist myself, this is not the first time I’ve gone through it. There have been many times when we were about to drop an album, then Israel invaded Gaza, or there was some protest, or people were getting killed. We learned how to maneuver in these unfortunate situations.
What’s the first move in that maneuvering?
Before business is people. A lot of it is mental support because many artists are going through a lot of emotional pain right now. Everyone knows someone in Gaza. Every family knows a family. I know a hip-hop producer in Gaza that lost his entire family.
If this becomes a long war, how do you foresee it affecting your business?
Music is like history books. The artists will be the ones telling the stories. They will document what’s happening better than the Western media. They will do better songs than Taylor Swift and not do a post about Taylor Swift’s bodyguard. I just hope this won’t get to a point when it’s normalized and [people] will forget about it.
The story of Taylor Swift’s bodyguard returning to Israel to serve in the Israel Defense Forces was widely covered by the media, including Billboard. What are your thoughts on that story?
From my perspective, showing how cute this bodyguard is [who is] going to join the army is not something to make cool at a time when thousands of kids are being killed. [Humanitarian organizations] consider the IDF an illegal army that has done a lot of illegal activities. We as people who are working for music and culture should be uplifting the voices that would heal this wound and not say, “Look at this Taylor Swift bodyguard.”
Is there anything else you would like to say?
I wish this interview was in a different time [with me] talking more about the business. I actually almost canceled because it’s overwhelming watching my family and friends going through genocide. I want to represent the new generation and the music that is fucking amazing; not the situation where there’s an oppressor bombing families as we speak.
I also want to say that from a music and culture perspective, we’re entering a very unique era of the glocalization of a new generation. The culture is morphing. There isn’t one culture anymore. There’s no one genre anymore. This is the voice that I would like to amplify more than anything.
Amir Nafar
Thomas Coesfeld says that the next 10 years will be much different for BMG than the last 10.
Navigating the onslaught of generative artificial intelligence (AI), diverging streaming economic models and the slowdown in streaming revenue growth is among the challenges “that are keeping me up at night,” says the new CEO of the world’s fourth-largest music company, who sat down with Billboard for his first U.S. interview since succeeding Hartwig Masuch in July.
At 33, Coesfeld is the fresh young face of one of Europe’s oldest and most powerful media dynasties. His grandfather was Reinhard Mohn, a legendary CEO of BMG’s German parent company, Bertelsmann. Coesfeld’s predecessor also earned a spot in the media conglomerate’s corporate pantheon. Masuch reinvigorated BMG after serving as an adviser for the company’s uncoupling from Sony in 2007, building it into an entity that generated roughly 900 million euros ($947.7 million) annually. It’s now Coesfeld’s job to lead the company beyond the 1 billion euro mark ($1.1 billion) by 2024.
The Berlin-based executive spoke candidly about the challenge he faces being a relative newcomer to the music industry and the acumen he developed while overseeing BMG’s balance sheet since 2021 as the company’s CFO. Coesfeld received a baptism by fire as one of BMG’s chief negotiators for song catalog acquisitions during the market run-up in the early 2020s. From 2021 to 2023, he helped the company land 70 deals, including acquiring the catalogs of rock icons Mötley Crüe and Tina Turner, as well as those of Mick Fleetwood, Paul Simon, The Pointer Sisters, Peter Frampton and The Hollies.
A photo of Coesfeld’s grandfather, former Bertelsmann CEO Mohn, viewing the Manhattan skyline in 1954. Much like him, Coesfeld says he has a “strong fondness” for the United States.
Urban Zintel
Bertelsmann, flush with cash after its failed acquisition bid for Simon & Schuster, has promised to invest between 5 billion and 7 billion euros ($5.3 billion to $7.4 billion) across its companies through 2025 — an infusion that should help Coesfeld outpace BMG’s nearest competitors, Concord and HYBE, which are both on track to close $300 million to $500 million in company acquisitions this year. But competition doesn’t trouble Coesfeld. He is less combative and more collaborative than is typically found in the music industry.
“I’m convinced that the key challenge of the music industry is not fighting each other,” he says. “It’s not about conventional distinctions between segments, like frontline or catalog, or companies, like majors or indies. There are bigger challenges than that. What is needed is a more collaborative approach with business partners to face this more challenging environment.”
You’ve been in the CEO seat for just over 100 days. What is the five-year plan for BMG?
My predecessor was an entrepreneur who brought Bertelsmann back into the music space. He achieved a thing you don’t see that often, particularly in media. We are a very established company on a solid foundation. Now comes a new chapter. The next iteration of BMG will focus on better engaging with our artists, songwriters and business partners. I’m truly convinced we can only be effective if we are not focusing too much on ourselves — not building too much resources internally — but instead focusing on the value creation and service delivery for the artists and songwriters. Naturally, we will continue on our investment strategy.
What does BMG taking digital distribution in-house mean for the company’s future?
First, it allows us to significantly upgrade our services for artists. We get better in our marketing ability to advocate for the songs, campaign management, things like that. Second, we get better and direct access to the data feeds from the platforms. Artists care about that. The third point is it’s massively enhancing our service portfolio. This enables us to offer a bigger variety of deals for artists to allow them to choose what kind of service level they want. And then obviously, every intermediary takes fees. So this allows us to have a more sustainable business model, become more competitive and offer more competitive terms to our artists. And artists get the monies faster.
Another photo of Mohn.
Urban Zintel
How does integrating the frontline business and catalog help you achieve these goals?
What’s key on the recording side is marketing. What is new and increasingly important is understanding the [streaming] channels. You need expertise for each [digital service provider]. Spotify is really different from Apple. We’ve had a direct relationship with YouTube for the last eight months, and the results are phenomenal — not just from a topline perspective, which is the ultimate measure, but also in having access to data, providing improved service on marketing, trending and velocity to artists. If you look through the lens of marketing, frontline and catalog become more integrated because the skill that makes the difference is marketing and understanding the channel. Consumption is way more fragmented. Fans make their own choices. Music taste is the decisive factor.
What do you expect streaming growth to look like in the coming years?
Two trends are relevant: One is that the massive market growth for the future of streaming in Western markets will happen through price increases. The second is the majority of the volume growth will happen in the developing markets. The good news is that the market is still fundamentally growing — not at the same speed as in the past 10 years — but we still have a fundamentally attractive market.
We need to own distribution to fully understand the trends early on and to react faster, to market in more tailored ways. With lower growth, we need to be more precise in how we invest marketing dollars.
How would you describe your leadership style?
There is a German saying: “You always see each other twice in life.” The idea of this saying is you always have opportunities — from a power-play perspective, you’re in a better situation — but the more sustainable approach is to still treat everyone as partners. We are in it for the long run. This is, for me, a paradigm for how to act on a daily basis. I’m very grateful for the partnership we had [with ADA]. We tripled our revenue. We’ve learned a lot, and it was clear from the get-go that at some point in time we would leave. [Warner Music Group CEO] Robert [Kyncl] and I had very frank conversations about it.
The statuette, which was a gift from Coesfeld’s aunt, “represents ambition,” he says.
Urban Zintel
What opportunities do you see in the catalog market?
We have a well-oiled machine. We know how to assess catalog, pitch and discuss with artists and songwriters. Hartwig built a reputation. Artists and songwriters trust us. That’s a big opportunity from a positioning standpoint. Paired with a very committed parent company, which is willing to fund the further growth of this company, we see massive growth, and I remain very optimistic about the market fundamentals. There are a lot of things going on which may cause challenges — streaming economics, generative AI — but I see those as massive opportunities for the industry overall.
How have your previous executive roles at Bertelsmann shaped you, and how will they shape BMG?
This is my first CEO role. Now, I can’t blame the CEO any longer! I’m a firm believer from my own experience that the way you treat people, the way you interact in all types of relationships, is critically important to firm longevity and business success. If you take that and apply it to BMG, it’s even more important because our clients are a diverse set of characters. That’s why they have fans. They are not normal. They are not average. They are different. They are beyond that. Treating people with respect is critically important, and that sets Bertelsmann apart from other companies.
And in my CFO role, I had the privilege of being responsible for a catalog acquisition strategy. That helped me a lot in getting to know so many artists over the last two to three years. That introduced me quite well to this industry. Not having been around for decades in the music business was a challenge and, at times, still is.
A keyring that Coesfeld bought in New York when he was 12 and has carried with him since.
Urban Zintel
What is BMG’s view of the ongoing experiments with artist-centric and user-centric streaming payment models?
We are not the market maker there, which is important to understand our views. Overall, I welcome that we are having this discussion as an industry. What is on the table is a great step in the right direction. We are about to establish mechanisms to fight fraud, money laundering, things like that. Even more importantly, in light of gen AI, it is so easy to create music and to have artificial consumption of music.
How do you see this as a tool to address your concerns around generative AI?
If you don’t have mechanisms that make a distinction between human artistry and white noise, then something is wrong about the system. The streaming economics were designed 12 years ago. They are just not the appropriate models any longer. One thing I’d love to see more pronounced is trust in consumer choices — so a distinction between the superfan who is listening to just one artist and the more infrequent listener who is also paying $11 a month but listening to 50 streams a month.
What are the pitfalls and opportunities of generative AI?
I do see a fundamental threat to the ‘copyright-ability’ of human creativity. If regulators do not hold up, we will have a big issue. What keeps me optimistic is that fans don’t just care about the musical expression. It’s about the personality, the artist — especially for superfans.
Whether he’s building live-music clubs and theaters or renovating them, Rick Mueller abides by a simple rule for his complex job: “The best venues bring out the best in the fans and the best in the band.”
As AEG Presents president of North America, Mueller, 50, oversees all of the rooms in the territory for which the company is the primary talent buyer.
His purview includes more than 100 U.S. properties — mostly theaters and clubs managed by one of 13 regional offices that report to him. Among them are those owned and operated by The Bowery Presents, a collection of destination plays such as Brooklyn Steel and Forest Hills Stadium in New York and a series of newly opened clubs in Boston, Denver, Atlanta and Cincinnati. He’s also heavily involved in business development, overseeing construction of new projects that AEG Presents will exclusively book, like Nashville Yards, as well as bringing existing venues like the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Bowl under AEG Presents management.
“We’re building AEG as [a collection] of more regionally run businesses,” he explains. “That allows us to be more responsive to those markets — what’s happening musically there and what the customer wants.”
Mueller, who is originally from the San Francisco Bay area and now lives in Los Angeles, contends that strategy gives AEG Presents a “distinct advantage” over its main competition, Live Nation, where he briefly worked. “Live Nation is a very centralized company,” he says. “They buy their talent centrally. They make their concession deals centrally. They probably have their alcohol sponsored, and it’s driving whatever they serve in their venues. I don’t know that they give a lot of specialized thought in any given city to what is a great experience.”
You have opened a lot of smaller clubs. How do you identify markets that need another venue?
Since the pandemic, we’ve opened The Eastern in Atlanta, Roadrunner in Boston and the MegaCorp Pavilion in Cincinnati. They’re all doing really well, and we want to continue to add a lot more venues to that list. We’ve got Nashville Yards, which will open up at the end of 2024 or early 2025. We’ve got a venue in Raleigh [N.C.] that will open up in the first half of 2025. These are brand-new builds. As for what markets we look at — any place there’s opportunity. Sometimes that’s a function of a certain capacity room that doesn’t exist in a marketplace.
What size venues are your sweet spot?
We’re focusing on locations with capacities of 1,500 to 5,000. There’s more and more bands that are coming out of this frictionless distribution of music. They are able to sell tickets, so there’s a huge demand for these size venues. The bands can’t find enough dates, and we want to make sure that we service that opportunity.
You’ve opened a club called Racket in Manhattan, a market where you already have a number of small clubs. Why open another?
New York is a market where we’ve invested in very small spaces because it’s a very important developmental market for our relationships and conversations with bands. We feel that finding any venue in Manhattan — in this case, we renovated the old Highline Ballroom —is an opportunity we’re going to look at every single time.
What niche will Racket fill?
Look, in New York there’s a variety of bands that could sell more tickets than probably any other market in the United States. It’s also a first statement-type play. These smaller rooms are where we do a lot of, call it R&D. We build relationships with young bands, and then we want them on a path to play our whole venue portfolio. We hope that carries all the way through to our bigger venues like Forest Hills. It’s a true vertical pipeline where we can service an artist’s needs at any level.
Are small music clubs the new A&R for artists?
I think the internet is A&R for artists. In this day of social media and frictionless distribution, artists can be their own advocates. As far as building a live base, New York is a very important market to start relationships with artists early. In key markets that can handle a lot of shows, we’re going to continue to invest in that.
A lot of live-industry innovations start at the club level. What are your priorities?
What you’re seeing across the board in the industry is the desire for more premium offerings. There’s a huge group of people out there who are willing to pay a little bit more whether it’s for a better seat, a better experience, a better drink, better dining. We’re looking at that, but we’re also tailoring our offerings so that there’s an experience for everybody. We want to make sure that we offer a range of experiences — from cheaper to high-end.
Billboard recently reported that Gen Z concertgoers aren’t big consumers of alcohol. How do you adapt?
We’re keeping a very close eye on that. It’s a big part of the business, and it certainly hasn’t dropped off a cliff. People are still drinking, and we’re doing more offerings, whether it’s nonalcoholic or specialty cocktails. Almost on a daily basis, we look at where our numbers are and try to understand why, but it’s something that’s really hard to see in the moment. You have to collect data, and by the time you see where the trends are going, you hope you’re in a position to adjust to it.
How does your division run differently than, say, Live Nation’s House of Blues chain and its smaller venues?
Live Nation takes more of, I’ll say, a cookie-cutter approach to music. House of Blues is a chain, and it’s the same somewhat uninspired experience anytime you go to one of them. We’re opening brands that we hope speak to their markets and stand with their own identity.
Have you noticed any changes in the way fans buy tickets since the pandemic?
When we first came back, the number of no-shows was much higher than we’re accustomed to. That pretty much leveled off and came back into what you’d call traditional ranges. There are trends where a fan might wait a little longer to buy tickets. That’s more market-specific, and that dynamic has always existed. When I first started in this business at Bill Graham Presents, Detroit was this crazy, huge, late-selling market and would do thousands of tickets week of show at some of the amphitheater properties. It doesn’t sell the same way now. San Francisco has had a lot of changeover in terms of its population. Sales are up, but we see [ticket purchases] shifting a little bit later in the overall cycle. We are seeing more of a strong close to a lot of shows there, and why that is I’m not sure. But as an industry, we’re still selling a lot of tickets early in the game, especially in big arenas and the stadium star category. Business has been incredibly good. You haven’t really heard about a lot of large-scale underperforming tours.
What are the hot genres for ticket sales?
Generally stated, country continues to explode, as well as the land that Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers and even Jason Isbell inhabit — they aren’t traditional-style country. Kelsea Ballerini’s most recent tour is exploding. We’ve also seen incredible results with dance music. If you look at what has gone on at Brooklyn Mirage, which is not in our company, they’ve had what appears to be a record season.
What headwinds do you see?
If there’s a negative trend in the business, it’s that more multigenre festivals have struggled to maintain success. The big experiences like Coachella, Lollapalooza, Outside Lands are stronger than ever. They’re brands that people trust, and the festival experience is great. Below that, some festivals have struggled, while you’re seeing more single-genre festivals — dance, for instance — succeed. Look at Electric Forest. It speaks to a very specific audience, and it’s stronger than ever.
A year ago, indie and smaller acts were canceling tours because they were losing money. Is that still happening?
It has leveled off. A lot of people had sold tickets at a different kind of ticket price before the pandemic and made their budgets on one set of dynamics. Then when it was time to go out and tour post-pandemic, it cost a lot more to be out on the road. If your sales weren’t that good or you weren’t expecting to earn any back-end, you could end up losing money, which is why I think some people pulled down their tour plans. Costs have gotten under control, but it’s still expensive to tour. The challenge for midlevel tours is finding a balance between prices that are welcome among the fan base and the costs of being out on the road. Sometimes you have to find a mix of festivals and soft-ticket money out there to help pay for the markets that don’t cover the nightly bill that you need to earn.
How does the currently high level of inflation affect AEG’s business?
It costs a lot more for security and the labor to run our shows. And again, in some of these big markets where there’s a lot of events going on on a given weekend, it can be hard just to find staff. So managing our labor costs has been a real challenge. We have to look carefully when we do an event and what that costs and if we can make enough money for it to be worthwhile. Sometimes you go into these unique situations where the artist doesn’t seem to make any money because it costs more to do the show, and we’re struggling to make money, but it’s an important look for the artist. So we are all going in with the right goals and intentions to grow that artist’s career so that they make money on their live shows when they come back to that market.
Enter the National Arts Club, a Victorian Gothic Revival brownstone off Manhattan’s Gramercy Park; climb four winding flights of stairs; pass the Pastel Society of America; and there will be the offices of director Wes Anderson’s longtime music supervisor, Randall Poster. And though in summer 2023 Hollywood is at a strike-induced standstill, Poster, creative director of Premier Music — the advertising-focused music supervision agency — is as busy as ever.
(Update: A tentative deal has been reached between screenwriters and the studios, streaming services and production companies.)
Poster’s film projects in the next several months include music supervision for the fall’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (with Anderson), Priscilla (with Sofia Coppola), Killers of the Flower Moon (with frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese), as well as Joker: Folie á Deux (with Todd Phillips) and Hit Man (with Richard Linklater).
And that’s just his day job. Amid the pandemic, an unlikely new passion became a calling when Poster started the Birdsong Project, enlisting his diverse group of artist friends to create music inspired by or incorporating birdsong in an effort to benefit avian life. The result: For the Birds, a 20-album box set containing 172 new pieces of music and 70 works of poetry (all proceeds go to the National Audubon Society) and has led to a growing global community that’s still evolving under his leadership, one in which he hopes the music industry will take a real interest.
How has the strike affected your business?
There are some movies I’m working on that we can’t get finished because we can’t get the main actors to do [automated dialogue replacement]. And then there are movies that were meant to start in the fall that are pushing. I think everyone’s unclear about how it’s going to play out. I don’t really talk to a lot of other music supervisors, but for people who are just scraping by in music supervision, the shutdown of shows is brutal. In terms of music departments, there has been constriction at the streamers, but I’m not sure that was borne out of the strike, at least to this point. But in the short term, I’m busy. And our company, in terms of doing a lot of advertising work, thankfully, that has been very active.
A sampling of Poster’s extensive collection of musician paintings by Dan Melchior, part of an ongoing series, alongside a ceramic bird by Ginny Sims.
Nina Westervelt
Even in the music industry, I think few understand very well what a music supervisor actually does. How would you explain it?
I view my work as a filmmaker, not just a person who deals with the music — using music to best tell a story, to compensate where the story needs a bit of help and having a really candid and fluid relationship with directors and producers. People always say to me, “Oh, Randy Poster’s the guy who picks the music for the Wes Anderson movies” — but I don’t pick the music. I don’t want to be the one who does. Directors pick. I may present, we may have a conversation borne out of months of musical dialogue, but ideally, it’s the director’s medium. When people come out of the movies I work on and say, “Oh, the music was the best part,” that’s not really a victory. When people say, “I don’t really even remember the music,” sometimes that’s the best service you can do to the film — that it feels like the fabric of the movie.
What does a normal day of work look like for you?
Making sure rights are coming in; working on scenes of a movie and putting different songs up to it; making calls to record companies and publishers to see if I can narrow a price differential in terms of what we have to pay and what they’re asking us to pay; reaching out to artists and managers to see if people are interested in recording new music; looking at cues that are coming in from the composer on the movie; putting together a playlist for a director — like when starting a project, using the music to establish a dialogue. Describing what music is doing is very difficult, and words don’t necessarily mean the same things to different people, but if you can relate to songs, it gives you a sense of tempo, vibe, instrumentation they like. And then getting feedback from directors and editors: “This is working. This isn’t. Is there too much music in the movie? Is there not enough?” Sometimes it’s my role to protect the silences.
From left: A painting of country artist Jim Reeves by artist Henry Miller; a ceramic bird sculpture by Joseph Dupré; a painting of Buck Owens’ band, The Buckaroos, by Ashley Bressler (one of many artists Poster has discovered on Instagram).
Nina Westervelt
Has the catalog sales boom affected your bottom line?
When certain catalogs were held by the artist or the artist’s camp, there was a little more flexibility. If a company pays $500 million for an asset, they can’t license something at what they would say is a sort of embarrassing rate. Like, “We’re only licensing this for $10,000 a use; it’s going to take us 200 years to recoup our investment.” On the other hand, I always feel, especially with older catalogs, a movie use is going to open up a new audience to that artist, whether it’s “Oh, that’s Rod Stewart?” or “Wow, I had an idea of what Janis Joplin was like, but I’m surprised by this.”
Does it feel less personal than working with publishers and songwriters?
I wish things were more human and less corporate, but I’ve seen it throughout my whole career. You used to have 12 companies you’d license music from, and then two companies would merge and they’d cut half the staff. They’d have the catalog, but no one would know whom to talk to. A lot of times, what we have to do is convince these companies they actually own something or help them make a connection. That can also be fun — the detective work that goes into figuring out who owns the rights to something. I just wish the music companies had more of an understanding of the process of filmmaking. Oftentimes, it’s not just needing the price to be right — it’s also getting a timely answer. Name the price; just give me an answer.
A cardboard replica of the police car from the Blues Brothers movie by artist Richard Willis.
Nina Westervelt
On the flip side of that, the synch business is so huge. Do you get pitched often?
Yeah, people are pitching nonstop. There are people whom I respect and trust, and my response is always I want to listen to anything you think is great, but I just want to find the right music. This is going to sound horrible, but I don’t do anybody any favors. I’ll do you a favor in life as my friend, but I will not put music in a movie because I’m connected to somebody. I certainly do file things away for the future. I may love a song but not have the right movie for it. At the moment, I’m working on things in the ’20s, the ’50s — period pieces.
How do you seek out new music?
Every way — through social media, through traditional music press, recommendations. I have two daughters who are very into music. Artists lead you to artists a lot. I’ve been very reluctant to use an algorithm to find music. Probably at certain points I’d benefit from that, but I like to discover it myself.
A beaded African tribal hat Poster bought from a street vendor on Manhattan’s Houston Street. “As we started reaching out to artists we loved to make album covers for the box set, I found myself looking at all sorts of bird- centric pieces, and I couldn’t resist them.”
Nina Westervelt
Speaking of discovery, how did you get the idea for the Birdsong Project?
I’m a New York City kid; I’m not really a nature boy. But during the pandemic, we were all somewhat soothed by the way nature seemed to be doing its thing, unperturbed by the virus, and a lot of my friends were noticing there were so many birds. A friend I work with, Rebecca Reagan, who lives in California and is much more involved in nature causes, was like, “You should get all your musician friends to create music around birdsong. That would be a great way to joyfully draw people’s attention not only to the beauty and variety of birds but also the crises facing birds. It would be a nonpolitical way to draw people to protect the birds.” For the most part, I’ve found, no one wants to see birds die. It’s a way to bring together people in community, which seems to be so difficult otherwise. The response from artists was very positive, and it just kept going.
What do you get out of it that you don’t from your day job?
I’m usually the person who has to be a very strong editorial hand in getting what we need for a movie. Here, I just said [to artists], “Thank you.” It was very much a broad invitation to do what they feel. I didn’t really give notes, other than maybe, “Hey, this is beautiful. Can it be nine minutes versus 23 minutes?” It was liberating. I had to allow a certain kind of randomness versus how you sequence music for a movie.
What are your ambitions for the project with respect to the music industry?
I would like to see us adopted by the music community like they have the TJ Martell Foundation. But that may be a longer road. So we’re just working away. The label Erase Tapes has 10 artists on the compilation, so in 2024, they’re going to do a Birdsong album by taking their artists and remixing them, and I’d like to do collaborations with other labels so it spreads. That way I’m not the record company — we work with your artists, we curate with you. I think we’ll be ready in 2025 to hopefully do a big Birdsong concert maybe in Central Park.
At this point in your career, you’re a bit of a music supervision legend. How do you advise young people who want to do what you do?
I encourage them to find their contemporaries who want to make movies and throw in. It has never been easier to make movies. I wanted to work on movies where that one kid in the movie theater thinks, “I want to do this” — Wes and I were that kid. Do whatever you need to do to create and be creative. When people ask me the difference between how I work now and how I worked 25 years ago — well, I probably cry a little bit less, in the sense that when a director does not choose a song I feel is so right, I have more of a balanced [reaction]. I still am up for battles, though. And hopefully, people want to work with me because I’m not just a rubber stamp. We have to fight for every cue.
Were David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross adapted for the music industry, Tom Windish’s mantra — “Keep booking” — could replace the play’s motivational line “Always be closing.”
At a time when agencies are consolidating and many agents are concentrating on their next career move, Windish remains focused on the core purpose of his job as head of A&R and business development at Wasserman Music: building an impressive roster of promising acts and established stars and helping them graduate to larger and larger stages. That roster includes alt-J, M83, Tove Lo, First Aid Kit, Rina Sawayama, Bartees Strange and superstar Billie Eilish, whom Windish helps route with Wasserman Music’s Sara Bowinkle. And this year, he signed one of his first management clients, activist and attorney-turned-artist Danielle Ponder.
“I like finding bands really early and rolling my sleeves up and figuring out every opportunity we can for them,” says Windish, 50. “When I’ve got an artist that’s already established at a certain level, I like going out and finding shows for them.”
The Schenectady, N.Y., native has worked for over three decades as an agent — first as an intern at WMA, where he was fired after three weeks for not being “William Morris material,” he says. After a stint at Billions, he opened The Windish Agency, which he sold to Paradigm in 2017. Wasserman Music launched in 2021 after acquiring Paradigm’s North American live music division. In 2023, the agency earned the distinction of booking the most acts at Coachella.
Windish recently relocated from Vancouver to New York, where he lives with his wife, film producer Emma Ludbrook — actor and 30 Seconds to Mars frontman Jared Leto married the couple in 2017 — and two children.
For Windish, discovery and development remain a large part of what drives him. “I probably take on more new things than almost anyone at the company,” he says. “I’m not necessarily saying that’s a good thing, but I tend to find artists that develop slower.”
How are your artists doing post-pandemic?
Last year was hard for artists because of supply chain issues. Just getting the gear that some artists needed was difficult. But this year sales have been very strong, especially in the United States, which has been very beneficial for agents that have international rosters. In Europe, things are much messier, and you see more acts coming to the U.S. a little more often than they used to.
What is your agenting style?
I’m pretty dry. My main responsibility is to send people music and have a conversation about what’s going on and why I’m excited about it. If they react to it or they don’t, I don’t take it personally. I’ll still call them about the next thing. I look for people I can build some history with that are passionate and take chances early.
Do you rely on data to make the case for your artists?
In the last decade or so, I do look at data a lot, especially global data. I have my ear really close to the ground in America and Canada. But I might not know something that’s happening in the Philippines or Korea or Australia because I’m not talking to the people there as frequently. What Spotify for Artists can reveal is interesting, and it’ll lead me to reach out and just ask other people, “Are you seeing this? What does it mean to you? Who is reaching out about it? What type of promotions are going on there? Should we have a tour strategy there? Should we go there?” I’ll also reach out to promoters at the same time.
Shows are being scheduled further and further in advance — deep into 2024. How do these long lead times affect the routing of tours?
I’m usually booking shows before new music is out. Often it’s nine months before it’s out, and I have no way of knowing how people are going to react or how likely they are to buy tickets. But one of the age-old rules of this business is don’t skip steps. So if you sold 500 tickets the last time, maybe you’ll try to sell 1,000 this time. You’re not just bumping up to 2,000 because you have this data that’s indicating there might be more [demand]. One of my strategies to deal with that is to hold a second night or a [venue] upgrade in case it goes really, really well.
Why sell to Paradigm?
I felt like the bigger we got, and the bigger the artists got, the harder it was to compete with these agencies that had a lot more resources. I felt I needed to compete and offer these things so that I wouldn’t lose out on clients. Paradigm had achieved its scale by bringing together independent agencies that all had similar backgrounds to me. Marty Diamond started in the coat closet booking bands in vans. Paul Morris started in the back of a record shop booking Tiësto.
What was that experience like for you, to sell Paradigm to Wasserman?
The sale was prompted by the pandemic. I didn’t know if the business was even going to come back. It was brutal — a lot more brutal for people in our business than others. It was an existential crisis. In terms of what it meant for the agency, I was in the dark about what was going on. There weren’t many people that I could ask because I think we were all in the dark because of the state of the business at the time. No one knew when shows were coming back. No one knew when there was going to be revenue coming back.
How does Wasserman compare with Paradigm?
They’ve been really helpful and great partners. I met [chairman/CEO] Casey Wasserman a few times over the years before it happened and while the transition was happening and was really excited about it. I mean, I was reading books about his grandfather Lew Wasserman for years because I’m a geek for that kind of stuff. I’ve read, like, every book about agents and Hollywood.
There have been complaints that labels are no longer developing and breaking acts. How does that affect the live business?
It’s hard to put it all in one bucket. I do think artist development is falling on the shoulders of the artists themselves and their managers. Labels are looking for artists to make an impact on their social media and to develop their own streaming. The labels get involved after things are moving. It’s “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
Have you ever signed an artist that hasn’t played a live show?
Oh, yeah. I remember a time when it was sacrilegious to sign an artist who hadn’t played a show. But if I didn’t sign artists before they had played a show, I wouldn’t be booking Billie Eilish. I wouldn’t be booking Lorde. And that’s the way it is now, and it’s OK.
What’s your perspective on Ron Burkle’s merging of the AGI and APA agencies?
When you look at all the changes that have happened in the last three or so years, it’s pretty wild. There’s a lot of things moving around, and I think that the biggest thing it shows is that we are all still trying to figure it out. We’re not done. Right now, everyone’s trying to perfect the model maybe, or at least improve their model.
What do you think of the emergence of companies like Firebird?
The interesting thing about Firebird is that we’re seeing now how much managers need to do. A lot of it is stuff that labels used to do. One of the more interesting things about Firebird is going to be how management companies evolve the services that they provide. Will there be more big management companies that are backed by groups like Firebird? Or will a bunch of different management companies share resources, like Artist Nation, where they all shared layers of infrastructure?
What genres are doing well on the road?
The thing I’m most interested in right now is just how global things are. I’ve been a student of that for a long, long time. In the old days, I was looking for artists from other countries because my competitors weren’t. So it was easier for me to sign them. There was an extra layer of a pain in the neck because of the visas and all that kind of stuff, but I was just like, “It’s fine. I’ll do it.” I signed Os Mutantes from Brazil and it was harder than booking an American rock band, but I love them. And now everybody’s signing stuff from all over the world in a lot of different genres. That is the way we now find fans. We kind of ignored these fans in the past because they liked acts we never expected. A lot of artists have been ignored because an agent decided they would never work. And looking back, many of them turned out to be wrong.
“There is a myth that at the SACEM restaurant, there are people serving food with white gloves and an orchestra playing,” the organization’s CEO, Cécile Rap-Veber, says with a hint of amusement in her voice. “It is a good story, but it is not true.”
Rap-Veber, who joined SACEM in 2013 and got the top job in 2021, is referring to what she calls its “old-fashioned” reputation. SACEM, which stands for Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Éditeurs de Musique, was founded in 1851 after composers Ernest Bourget, Victor Parizot and Paul Henrion refused to pay their bill at the Paris cafe Les Ambassadeurs until they got paid for the use of their compositions there. It became the first music collecting society, as well as the model for those that followed, and over the years, it grew into something of a French cultural institution: important, successful and perhaps overly aware of it.
Rap-Veber is not running your père’s SACEM, however. As a result of European Union (EU) legislation, collective management organizations (CMOs) in Europe now compete to represent and license online rights throughout the continent (and in some other countries) on behalf of songwriters and publishers. “We are now a global society,” she says.
SACEM still licenses public performance rights in France, but it now competes with other societies, most significantly ICE — a licensing hub owned and operated by the U.K. CMO PRS, the German GEMA and the Swedish STIM — to license works to online services in many international markets. (The United States is not one of them, but SACEM represents online rights in many markets for ASCAP and Universal Music Publishing Group, among others.)
Rap-Veber has pursued a “SACEM 3.0” strategy that she describes as “maximizing rates and minimizing costs,” plus offering new services like URights, which can track the use of music internationally, and MusicStart, which lets creators register their works on a blockchain-based system.
A statuette celebrating the diamond certification of the soundtrack to the 2006 movie musical Le Soldat Rose.
Matthew Avignone
These strategies appear to be working. In June, SACEM announced that 2022 was its best year ever. CMOs across Europe are benefiting from the return of live music and growth in streaming. But SACEM grew more than its peers — its collections increased 31% in 2022 to 1.4 billion euros ($1.5 billion). Even as growth boosts the entire sector, “I have to prove that we deliver the best services at the best cost,” she says. “And honestly, I think we can prove that.”
Congratulations on setting a record for SACEM.
It might be a worldwide record as well. And there is nearly 300 million euros [$328.8 million] more on top of it. In France, we collect neighboring rights [royalties for sound recordings] and private-copy levies [on blank media, which are distributed among rights holders in various businesses] for all the culture industries. So if I talk about the performance of our team, it’s not 1.4 billion euros — it’s 1.7 billion euros [$1.9 billion]. And when I look at the first quarter of 2023, that’s also very good.
Why so good?
In the first quarter of 2022, France still had some COVID-19 restrictions, and then the summer and the rest of the year were great. We also have new agreements — with Hipgnosis, with [Hungarian CMO] Artisjus to collect online, and with ASCAP — plus renewed agreements with better rates, especially for online. And now we collect [for online uses] in more than 150 countries directly.
You talk about running SACEM like a business. Is that a reflection of the competition among the various societies?
There was a time when there was a kind of monopoly in each country. There was no consciousness of the cost because there was no competition. Then the European Commission said any rights holder can withdraw his rights for online uses, and suddenly we were in competition. And we have the highest tariffs in the world.
Rap-Veber’s husband made this painting from a photo he took at a private 2007 Amy Winehouse concert booked by former Universal managing director Valery Zeiton.
Matthew Avignone
How do they compare with U.S. royalties under the new Copyright Royalty Board settlement?
They have reached 15.1%, and it will rise. We already had 15% when Apple Music released its service in 2015. And it’s not just the rate — it’s the minimum per subscriber. Ours is higher since it’s independent of discounts. When you see our effective net rate, it’s above 15%. I’m sure it’s easier for us than for a small Eastern European society: It’s the strength of your repertoire, and it’s unbelievable the repertoire we represent.
What’s your reaction to claims that streaming payouts are less fair for songwriters and publishers than recorded-music rights holders?
The highest tariff we had on CDs was 9% of the gross price. Then iTunes forced the community to agree on 8% on each download. Now we’re above 15%. Digital has become our biggest source of revenue. I think the main issue is that [the revenue is] going to very few people. There are people, especially in urban music, who are very happy.
CMOs are coming under pressure from some of the big publishers and platforms, both of which would rather strike direct deals than go through organizations like SACEM.
To go direct with one publisher? What does that mean? We represent [the publisher-led mechanical rights organization] IMPEL, [Canadian rights organization] SOCAN, Artisjus, ASCAP and Universal Music Publishing [among others], so we mutualize our cost [of operations] and we decreased our commission on digital for our members to 9%. That’s what I’m most proud of in the last [few] years. I want to use technology to process more at a lower cost. I think it’s the wrong way to think to go direct: It’s one thing for the majors, but what about the others?
You got the top job at SACEM in an interesting way. The tradition at CMOs is that the chief executive retires with a gold watch, but you basically replaced Jean-Noël Tronc as CEO in 2021.
Jean-Noël had been here for 10 years, and I was about to quit because — honestly, I had a job opportunity, OK? So I left SACEM, and Jean-Noël and the board had a discussion, and they decided to stop their relationship. The board asked me to take the interim job, but I already had this new job. And the team here said, “Are you kidding? You’re not going anywhere!” So I went back to the board and said, “I’m interested if you agree with my plan [for] SACEM 3.0,” and they did.
For a long time, there were no women running CMOs. Now there are many: Beth Matthews at ASCAP, Andrea Martin at PRS, Jennifer Brown at SOCAN and Cristina Perpiñá-Robert at SGAE. What took so long?
There was a lot of ego. It was a small circle of people: “We are so smart, ho ho ho! Let’s have lunch and a cigar.” CEOs then were more focused on an institutional view, and now we’re more focused on day-to-day matters and how to reduce costs. Women know how to reduce costs.
What’s your favorite song?
There are so many, it depends on the mood. The songs of the moment…
That’s cheating.
Serge Gainsbourg’s “Initials B.B.,” for sure. Songs by David Bowie, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” by Elton John, The Beatles, “Live and Let Die” from Wings. When you want to feel better, listen to “Sunny” by [German disco act] Boney M. Or Queen of the Night [the aria in “The Magic Flute”] from Mozart.
Rap-Veber says she discovered this photo of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, which was taken for their 1969 joint album, when she was looking for ways to monetize Universal Music Group’s archives. “It had never been exploited before I found it,” she says.
Matthew Avignone
SACEM operates in a very different legal environment from the United States. France has stronger copyright laws to protect creators but also regulations that require SACEM to set aside money to fund culture.
It’s part of our DNA because that’s what a “collective” is. With SACEM, you have the highest rates in the world: concerts, more than 8%; broadcasters, more than 3%. If we take tiny amounts [for cultural funding], you will still get paid more than from any other CMO.
Some Americans hate this idea on principle.
Many of these cultural funds come from private copy levies that don’t exist in the Anglo-American system. By law in France, and this is typically French, 25% of this revenue must be allocated to cultural action. So we pay out the 75% that no one else in the world pays, except GEMA. The publishers benefit from it, too, because it helps them develop new creators.
According to EU regulations, I am required to ask you about artificial intelligence.
Last year, it was the metaverse, but this will last much longer. We see opportunities and dangers. Opportunities: As a tool, it can help musicians create music. The main issue for us is how we know whether or not our works have been used in a new product [and] how we can get paid. It’s a worldwide discussion, but I think Europe — and I hope France — will be at the center of it. We already have 120,000 songs uploaded a day, and 60% of the 100 million tracks on Spotify have less than 100 streams a year. Why do the platforms take all of this nothing music?
A lot of songwriting talent in Africa is turning to SACEM or other European societies to license their online rights internationally. How are you handling that?
African creators are usually with their local societies for their home countries, but many are SACEM members for the rest of the world. One problem is that many of these societies in Africa are controlled by the government. The only thing I can do is partner with them to help them improve their systems. In Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, we just entered worldwide digital agreements so we can represent their repertoire for the world. We’re working with Morocco, too, and PRS is doing partnerships in some English-speaking countries. The idea is to be a bridge between the continents. I don’t wantto be seen as a colonialist — I want to be a partner.
Amid the sports memorabilia in Tim Leiweke’s office, there’s a small framed quote with the word “Motivation” at the top. Leiweke, the chairman/CEO of Oak View Group (OVG), is a 45-year veteran of the estimated global $25 billion concert industry who spent the pandemic building seven new arenas — five of which his company owns and operates — so he’s not one to hang inspirational thoughts from Wikiquotes on his wall. “Motivation” is followed by a question: “How does ASM differentiate itself from its main competitor, Oak View Group?”
The answer comes from Ron Bension, president/CEO of ASM Global, and the most salient part reads: “There are other companies that are noisier, but we’re managing more buildings, with more content from Live Nation and AEG than anywhere else in the world.”
Oak View Group and ASM are indeed competitors in managing facilities around the globe, and it’s important to know that ASM is co-owned by sports/live-entertainment company AEG, where Leiweke was CEO until his “mutually agreed upon departure” in 2013 from the company owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz. Leiweke, 66, says he wishes Anschutz “nothing but luck,” but he also says he carries a copy of Bension’s quote in his backpack and reads it before every presentation he makes. “Never piss off your competitor,” he says with a broad smile. “I thank Ron daily that he has decided it’s me that causes him success. Maybe that motivates me as much as it motivates him.”
In 2015, Leiweke partnered with multisector music magnate Irving Azoff to build a company that now manages approximately 500 facilities. OVG employs 5,000 people full-time (including Leiweke’s daughter, Francesca Bodie, who is president of business development), with another 35,000 part-time staffers.
The arenas OVG has built in the last 18 months include Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle; Acrisure Arena in Palm Springs, Calif.; CFG Bank Arena in Baltimore; and UBS Arena on New York’s Long Island. “We did it in the middle of COVID, inflation, rising interest rates, labor issues, political issues,” he says.
OVG is working on multibillion-dollar projects in Las Vegas; Manchester, England; and, in partnership with Live Nation, São Paulo, and Leiweke says it’s time for the music industry to recognize the crucial role companies like his play in fan satisfaction. “Everyone talks about the promoters, the agents and the managers,” he says. “The brick-and-mortars and the fan experience are equally important. We’re spending tens of millions on acoustics and air-handling systems that deal with things like COVID. And yet people underestimate our passion for how important that is to the live experience.”
“We did a lot of boxing in the AEG days,” Leiweke says. “I’ve got signed globes by Wladimir Klitschko, Lennox Lewis, Oscar De La Hoya. I don’t know how many gloves I have.”
Joel Barhamand
How did you get the Long Island Railroad to open a station at your UBS Arena?
Paid for it. Our landlord and our partner is the state of New York. We went through two governors and a lot of politics to get the deal done. If you look at all the other facilities in the New York area, except for [Madison Square] Garden, Citi Field was built with bonds issued by state and city authorities. The Meadowlands [in New Jersey] was paid for mostly by taxpayers’ dollars. Barclays Center [in Brooklyn] involved bonds. That’s the nature of many of these projects. We were private. Us and [New York] Islanders [co-owner] Scott Malkin put up $1 billion privately to build that arena. Of that billion, roughly $75 million was a cash contribution toward that light rail station. It’s about developing a private-public partnership that works for everybody, which enabled us to get a lot more done there than most anyone else.
The opening of that station has made going to UBS convenient and environmentally friendly. Did sustainability play a part?
We happen to be very sustainable around here. UBS is LEED-certified. Our goal is to make that a carbon-neutral venue within the next couple of years. Obviously, we had the first carbon-neutral arena ever in Seattle. You cannot be carbon-neutral if everyone is driving there for every event. So mass transportation was highly important to us, to get somebody from Penn Station or Grand Central [in Manhattan] in a 30-minute train ride. It was also highly important for the viability of that building in a very competitive marketplace for arenas. You’ve got Prudential Center [in New Jersey], Barclays, the Garden and you’ve got us. We’ve got to find a way to get people in and out without it having to be about the Long Island Expressway.
What is the strategy behind building in secondary and tertiary markets like Palm Springs, Calif.?
There are small markets and big markets, and a combination of those deals is smart. Partially because in North America, the majority of big arenas are owned or controlled by an NBA or NHL tenant. They’re greedy, and they have a strategic value within that market that we don’t have, which is, if you want me to keep this team here, you’ve got to help me build or take over this arena. We’re going to get a few of those — Seattle and New York are examples — but we also have to find either A markets that don’t have an anchor tenant, which are few and far between, or B markets. The business proposition in a B market is just as good as an A market because we can build an arena there for between $200 million and $300 million. I’m not going to get the 86 nights of music that I’m getting in Seattle, but Irving and I can live with 40 nights of music in Palm Springs. And then, we happen to have probably the most financially successful American Hockey League team there this year with the Coachella Valley Firebirds. The mix of those two means we get just as good a rate of return on every dollar I invested at Acrisure as we will in Seattle. We love these B markets because there’s 20 of them out there compared with half a dozen of the A markets.
You’re seeing a lot of growth right now. When does what you do plateau?
It won’t be in my lifetime. There are 50 markets in the world today that need new arenas, but only 20 of them will make sense. I’m very driven by the rate of return that we get on our investment. Irving, the employees and I own the majority of this company. I have an investment partner in Silver Lake, and I’m very driven to get them a healthy valuation on this asset one day because they put a lot of money into it.
Memorabilia from the arenas that OVG has built and the sports teams associated with them. From left: hockey pucks from Climate Pledge Arena and the Seattle Kraken; a plaque from Baltimore’s CVG Bank Arena; a shovel from the groundbreaking for UBS Arena.
Joel Barhamand
You talk a lot about the importance of “alignment” with partners before the work starts. How has that benefited OVG beyond the seven arenas you’ve built?
In Seattle, Climate Pledge Arena was a 50-50 joint venture between us, [Seattle’s NHL team] the Kraken, and [the team’s majority co-owner] David Bonderman. David and I were aligned on that vision for the arena from day one — before he got the team.
That is a city-owned facility, and we continue to be good partners and good neighbors with Mayor Bruce Harrell, Governor Jay Inslee, and county commissioner Dowe Constantine. My brother deals with them every day on our behalf. We’re jumping into Memorial Stadium there because it’s the right thing to do for the city and the county and the school district. And so that alignment with the people I just mentioned has created a hell of an asset. Even though we privatized it, they own it. It has also created all kinds of other opportunities, including our new restaurant, event center and the bid we’re making on Memorial Stadium. And we’re just getting started.
How much of an advantage is it for you that, once you build these venues, you can then bring in Harry Styles or the Eagles because of your partnership with Irving Azoff?
At the end of the day, we’ve got no chips with anybody out there. We’re not promoters, which means we get along with everyone. Louis Messina is one of my best friends. We have known each other most of our adult lives. I have a great relationship with Michael Rapino and everybody else at Live Nation. I like Jay Marciano. I hired Jay. I should be able to get along better with Jay, but there are other relationships at play there. As great as it is to have Irving as my partner, he’s only part of the equation.
Arena builds are not your only business.
We do 16 different services. I probably have 40 people in this company that work with every promoter, including some that route Irving’s tours for him. What makes us dangerous is, we are everybody that wants us to come in and bid because we’ve spent $4 billion building arenas. We’re going to do it better because we’ve got real skin in the game. We raise the debt on each of these buildings through my daughter Francesca and her division. We do the food and beverage, parking. We have a division called GOAL where we learn how to operate buildings more sustainably each year and rate them annually. We have 150 people selling naming rights and sponsorships every day.
How important are VIP packages and services?
We sell premium — suites and club seats. Premium and hospitality are still a huge growth opportunity. We’re just closing a deal on Rhubarb Hospitality Collection, RHC. They’re a high-end catering, food and beverage company based in London, New York and Berlin. They have one of the top restaurants in New York, Peak at Hudson Yards. We’ve also brought on Christian Navarro from Wally’s Wine and Spirits [in Beverly Hills]. When people come into our VIP areas, we want to create a whole different level for them. RHC is my fourth food and beverage company.
You’ve got a massive development in Las Vegas.
The biggest bet we’ve ever made is our project in Las Vegas. You could add New York and L.A. together, and they don’t do as much live entertainment as Vegas. It’s the live-entertainment capital of the world. But let’s look at the venues. There must be 10 nice theaters on the Strip. You need good arenas, too. T-Mobile was my last deal at AEG. It’s a nice arena, but it pales in comparison to what we just built in Seattle, New York and Austin. How do you have the No. 1 live-entertainment marketplace in the world and its arena is not one of the 30 nicest arenas in the country? You’ll hear about this soon, but we have a lot of world-class partners, brands and entrepreneurs who have come together to build out a 100-acre campus that will be the destination for live entertainment, culture, the arts and hospitality.
What does your overseas strategy look like?
The majority of projects we’re working on are overseas, like São Paulo with Live Nation. Thirty million people live in São Paulo. It’s a great music market. Latin music and K-pop are the biggest industry influencers now. We are also highly focused on Singapore and Asia; Lagos, because look at the artists coming from Nigeria. That’s where you’ve got to go for live music and culture and arts. We have a partner from Nigeria to build the single best arena in all of Africa.
You’ve also got Co-op Live opening in Manchester.
That is the capital of the U.K. for live events. That arena is going to be a top five arena in the world. When I opened up Staples Center in 1999, Bruce Springsteen was my opening artist for two nights, and the first night he told everyone, “Why don’t you come out of those corporate boxes and join us.” He didn’t have a great experience. I was like, goddamn it, the Boss just ripped me a new one from the stage. What he told me after the Staples concert is, “Tim, I like hot, sweaty halls.” When he opened up the CFG Bank arena for us in April, I said to him, “You’ve been running around my brain for 25 years because I failed you miserably.” Co-op Live is going to be the first music-only arena that is a hot, sweaty hall, and yet it will have 32 points of destination — restaurants, clubs and VIP spaces. It’s the first time we said, make it about music — make the bowl perfect — and then we’ll shoehorn in whatever else is important outside the bowl. Make all of the people right on the artist so it’s a hot, sweaty hall. I think that arena is going to change our industry. We’re sniffing around in Barcelona and Madrid. We want to go to the great cultural markets of the world where they have arenas that are 30, 40 years old and make those the next flags for the company. We have $2 billion to $3 billion of additional investment coming outside of Vegas and the projects we’re building in the U.S.
What’s your perspective on the Taylor Swift ticketing issue that Live Nation encountered? What could it have done better?
Ticketmaster did nothing wrong on Taylor Swift except for handling the demand, and we all knew that was coming. In a perfect world Taylor, Louis Messina and Ticketmaster would go back, take those dates and spread out the on sales. But at the end of the day it’s the bots and the scalpers that broke that system down. Did Taylor get any money from all of those secondary companies? Not a penny. Did the arenas or stadiums? I’ve spent $4 billion. Why is it that I let a secondary company come into my arena and resell my tickets and keep those fees? It’s a crime.
What are you doing to solve scalping and secondary-market issues?
I’ve got some ideas. In Seattle, we cleansed our season ticket list, our premium list and our club seat list. We got rid of anyone that was a scalper or secondary company so they couldn’t use the right of first refusal on concerts to tie those tickets up. Second is the bots. If an artist wants to be protected, we have to create smart tickets. And one day, your tickets are going to be here. (Holds up his hand.) We use the Amazon “grab and go” using your hand system. It’s not perfected yet, but within two years, it’s going to be phenomenal. Then we’ll be able to put the ticket in there and work a deal between Ticketmaster and Amazon. Just as technology has created the problem, so technology will solve the problem.
There’s also an outcry against fees.
They want to come in and say get rid of fees, but the reality is the fees are split by everybody in the pool. The artist gets some of the fees. Yes, they do. The building gets some of the fees and the promoter gets some of the fees. The fees are shared. There is an economic universe out there of rebates and waiving rent and giving artists free nights in the arena. That’s all part of this ecosystem of sharing fees. Everyone tends to forget about that. Ticketmaster does not even make the majority of fees. It’s not the fees. Should we tell people what the fees are in advance? That’s a good idea. But at the end of the day, if we want to attack what ultimately creates the majority of problems that people like The Cure or Taylor Swift feels strongly about, then attack the secondary companies who have no skin in the game.
“Shaq is our partner,” Leiweke says of NBA star Shaquille O’Neal, whose Big Chicken franchise is among the concessions found at OVG venues.
Joel Barhamand
Do you think Congress is focusing on the right players then?
Congress can’t even get a budget passed. Can they please just go run the country. Do I think they could solve the ticketing problem? No. These are the people saying it’s all Ticketmaster’s fault. No. Come learn the business, and what we’ll tell you is that the very same lobbyists you’re listening to that wrote that bill that you want to pass — they’re the problem.
The lion’s share of an act’s income comes from live shows. How much longer can we look at the live business as this sort of unlimited resource for artists, and whose responsibility is it to foster new arena and stadium acts?
How long can we maintain this ratio? I think forever because as I said music is the essence of our life. The economics have shifted, but the demand for music, recorded music, hasn’t shifted. It’s streaming now, and the economics are different. But we now have more ability to get more music from more artists than ever before. That’s who’s developing the emerging artists, god bless them — those streaming services. Ironically, they took some of the economics out of what an artist makes but they’ve created tens of thousands of more artists now, and who would have ever guessed that today we’d be seeing these K-pop and Latino artists? I’m looking at some of the numbers we did for Grupo Firme and Rauw Alejandro. The amount of tickets that Latino artists sell is unheard of. The same with K-pop. We just did four nights of K-pop including Suga, and UBS sold out everything. We had record merchandise sales. We’re going to continue to see that, and I give a lot of credit to the streaming industry. That’s going to be the live pipeline. So, maybe the economics ultimately got kind of turned a little bit against the artist, but it’s created far more artists that can now go sell out arenas.
Will they come up through the clubs or go straight to arenas?
We have the theater alliance because I think that’s highly important. Clubs are highly important. Both Live Nation and AEG are doing a great job on clubs. I’m a huge fan of Bowery Presents, and we’d like to have a better relationship with them. We will one day when the personalities get shifted. Will we keep going at the rate we’ve been going the last two years? Probably not. We’re seeing record rates, and we see it again next year. Our bookings are very, very strong for next year. But this is going to continue for a while because people have pent-up demand and discretionary income. I also think people went through Covid and said I’m going to go live life. Well, music happens to be something that relates to everybody. So, this isn’t going to stop. We’ll continue to develop smaller venues like Acrisure, which is a huge stepping stone for a lot of Latino bands. Everyone was scared of that marketplace except for Paul Tollett. I’m like, Paul’s pretty smart. I’ll follow his lead.
The same goes for sustainability when it comes to venues and festivals. You seem to be doing a lot on that front, but whose responsibility is it?
Sustainability is the overriding factor of this company. We spent $150 million on sustainability in Seattle saving the roof. I floated that roof in the air for three years. Everyone thought build a new arena, but that is the greatest waste of our planet — new steel, new glass, new everything. I thought, what if we reuse stuff? The arena’s roof is historic. It was originally part of the Washington State Pavilion at the 1962 World’s Fair. We figured out how to float it in the air with temporary steel supports, and I reused the steel. Then we took the front of the building and built an atrium system and a people-moving system to get everyone up and down. Take the existing arena, tear it down, build a hole three times as large, go down, not up because I use less energy below ground level. I don’t have to spend as much money on heating or cooling. Then drop the roof back on. Everyone says, “Oh, the renovation.” I’m like renovation? This is $1.15 billion. Renovate my ass. The only thing that stayed was the roof, and then three of the four sides is the original glass from the 1962 World’s Fair. I preserved it, packed it, stored it for two years and then put it back on. Then I had to retrofit the glass with fiber for earthquakes because the earthquake standard has changed since 1962.
You and Irving Azoff were once rivals and now you’re partners. What does that say about the music industry?
Yo-yos. It’s up and down, up ad down. We were partners, then enemies, then partners. I’m hoping that cycle has played itself out completely. Michael Rapino and I fought aggressively against each other. We’re not best of friends, but I’d say in our business he’s one of the greatest partners I have. The music business is a unique business because everyone thinks they’ve got to be either best of friends or fighting each other. There’s no in-between. The drama in the music business is crazy. We’re drama free around here. Our job is to get along with everybody. That’s the good thing about being private. People say, “Do you get along with Phil?” I wish him nothing but the best of luck. Whatever AEG does, I’m proud that I hired the majority of those people. And guess what, whether they succeed or fail, it will have little impact on my company. The greatest drama I had in my life is when Irving and I were fighting each other because he’s formidable. I’m very happy he’s on my side of the equation.
Jimmy Humilde’s first foray into the music business was a party at his sister’s house in Venice, Calif., that he promoted with street flyers. The entrance fee was $5, and Humilde, then 13 years old, made $300. He was hooked.
It was the early 1990s, and the soundtrack of the streets was trance, techno and hip-hop. But Humilde (born Jaime Alejandro to immigrants from Michoacán, Mexico) soon started to include the music of his home in his flyer parties, adding Vicente Fernández and Mexican cumbias into the mix. Then a cousin introduced him to the music of Chalino Sánchez, the underground corrido singer from Culiacán, Mexico, who was kidnapped and murdered at 32 years old in 1992 in what presumably was a revenge killing.
“I didn’t know who Chalino Sánchez was. I didn’t know what a corrido was,” says Humilde, 43, of the songs that narrate the exploits of real and mythical heroes and antiheroes, from 19th century revolutionaries to current-day drug dealers. “But when I met his music, he became part of my soul. He wrote corridos not only for Mexican people but for people who lived in the U.S. that I could relate to.” Sánchez’s songs, combined with his swaggering attitude and combustible persona, planted a seed for Humilde: Why couldn’t there be more music like his, rooted in Mexican culture and appealing to a young, U.S.-born audience?
Nearly 20 years later, his label, Rancho Humilde, is at the forefront of a global explosion of regional Mexican music — the umbrella term for several subgenres that include brass-driven banda, accordion-inflected norteño, traditional mariachi and, increasingly, traditional music that incorporates hip-hop.
Since Rancho Humilde, which translates to “Humble Ranch,” began releasing music in 2017, the label has logged 18 titles on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, including six top 10s, and 41 tracks on Hot Latin Songs. Out of those, seven reached the top 10, including the two-week champ “Bebe Dame.” The label has also placed six songs on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100. Five of them were on the May 6 chart that featured 14 regional Mexican songs, two of them in the top 10 — a breakthrough week for the genre. Fuerza Regida, Natanael Cano and Junior H are among the Rancho Humilde acts that charted.
A friend used canvas from Humilde’s Louis Vuitton travel bags to create this saddle and mount. “Just for decoration!” he says.
Michael Tyrone Delaney
Humilde and his partners, José Becerra and Rocky Venegas, built the label through unorthodox means, relying almost solely on social media over radio and TV to promote their acts and by working with multiple labels and distributors, which enabled their roster to collaborate with a wider array of artists from different genres at a time when Mexican acts were notoriously averse to the practice.
Almost six years after Rancho Humilde was founded, the label is opening new offices in Paramount, Calif., just outside Los Angeles. Not coincidentally, it’s the exact location where Sánchez once ran his own pager store.
“I’m in it for the future of our culture,” Humilde says. “From the beginning, I wanted to be the door-opener.”
What was it like growing up in Venice in the ’90s?
Hip-hop was my heart. I was a huge fan of LL Cool J, Kool Moe Dee, EPMD — old-school hip-hop. To this day, I still listen to hip-hop a lot. I grew up in a multiracial area. There were a lot of Mexicans, but also a lot of Asians and whites. Corridos and Mexican music were not it. They called me “Jimmy the Paisa,” which in our neighborhood meant “straight Mexican.” So while I did raves and hip-hop events for many years, I was the only one in Venice listening to Mexican music. I was the guy known for tejanas.
This Kobe Bryant bobblehead “is the only one in the world” in its size, says Humilde. “I love Dodgers, Lakers, Raiders and Rams memorabilia.”
Michael Tyrone Delaney
With that multicultural atmosphere, why did you enter the regional Mexican business?
I’ve been in the business since I was 14, when I started working as a gopher with another Mexican artist who sang corridos, Jessie Morales, El Original de la Sierra. I realized that we were losing our Mexican culture. The kids weren’t speaking Spanish. It wasn’t cool. I’ve always thought it’s so cool to be Mexican, to have immigrant parents and to speak both languages. I thought I could introduce others to this life. I had to find a way to mix my culture, my Chicano culture, with the Mexican culture. And I did.
What was Rancho Humilde’s breakthrough moment?
“De Periódico un Gallito,” a song by LEGADO 7 we released in 2017. [It peaked at No. 38 on the Regional Mexican Airplay chart.] That corrido talks about a guy who grew up on the streets of Los Angeles and was a drug dealer. That’s the corrido that opened the doors to our music. We basically did a hip-hop song in Spanish. Then we signed Arsenal Efectivo, El de la Guitarra, Fuerza Regida, then Natanael Cano.
Peso Pluma is dominating the charts. He sounds very similar to Cano, with whom he has collaborated.
Peso Pluma calls Natanael “The GOAT.” Natanael Cano opened the lane for everyone. If Nata, Junior H, Fuerza Regida hadn’t existed, this wouldn’t be where it’s at today. Natanael brought swag. He brought that kid that didn’t give a fuck. He brought that, “I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want, and I don’t care” attitude. When I first asked Nata what tumbao was, he said: “I am tumbao.” Before, corridos were listened to by fans with cowboy hats and boots. Today, you’ll see 13-, 14-year-old kids in Jordans listening to corridos tumbaos.
Humilde explains that the liquor store, which was built as a prop “for our music videos,” is a replica of a corner from his old Venice neighborhood.
Michael Tyrone Delaney
Your artists weren’t the first to blend Mexican and hip-hop sounds, but acts like Akwid in the 2000s didn’t reach the level of success that Rancho Humilde’s artists are having now. Is it simply a matter of timing?
It didn’t work before because the people behind it weren’t real. They weren’t from the streets. They were copying what other people were doing. Akwid is from the streets, but the people behind them weren’t.
What is your strategy for working with multiple distributors? Most labels usually strike a deal with just one. For example, Cano with Warner; Fuerza Regida with Sony.
I’m not committed to just one. Me, along with my attorneys — George Prajin and Anthony Lopez — structured our own contract and our own way of doing business. I don’t have exclusivity with anyone. I don’t think anyone should have exclusivity with anyone. I don’t believe in licenses because there’s only one person that owns our music, and it’s [us]. And I’m also business partners with our artists. We restructured our whole company, and we don’t sign artists to a royalty fee. We sign artists as business partners, we help them build their own labels and businesses, and we do a [joint venture] between labels.
You’re so indie-minded. Why distribute with Warner’s Alternative Distribution Alliance and Sony’s Orchard versus another indie?
My whole goal was to [go global]. And I finally realized that the only people I was going to be able to do it with was with a global company. That’s why I chose Warner at first, then Sony, then Universal; I did a one-off deal with Republic and Universal. I needed the reach. I needed people to learn about this and realize it was different. It wasn’t only about us being banda.
Medals given to the owners of Rancho Humilde when they visited the White House.
Michael Tyrone Delaney
How important is social media to Rancho Humilde’s success?
Social media is Rancho Humilde. We were born in social media. We started with Myspace all the way down to Facebook, all the way down to Instagram and TikTok. But our biggest [avenue] was YouTube. YouTube is huge for us revenuewise, bigger than the other platforms. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are our main marketing channels. We were never on radio until the most recent hit by Fuerza Regida. The only work we outsource is with our publicist, Monica Escobar, who does everything we don’t do on marketing on our end.
One of the biggest challenges facing successful industries in Mexico are the drug cartels. In recent years, they’ve taken over the trade of limes, avocados and other produce. As music becomes an exponentially more valuable export, how do you protect your business from that influence?
I just feel that certain people got their help as they could. That’s one of the things that kept Rancho Humilde from becoming the most successful label [quickly], because we never had any investors. It was always JB, Rocky and myself. I don’t care who it is. I just don’t believe in investors. Have other companies used that? I don’t know. I’ve never asked. I know drug cartels exist, and my dad always told me the biggest cartel was the government and the church. I agree with that. I don’t fight it. I don’t criticize anyone for what they do. I don’t care what they do.
Rancho Humilde’s 2019 release of Cano’s “Soy el Diablo” remix with Bad Bunny was groundbreaking at the time. Now mainstream labels are signing Mexican acts. What do you think of that?
I don’t see why they wouldn’t, but it’s going to be hard for them to catch up to all the indies already performing at a high level.
What does it mean to you that this music is now popular in places far from Mexico?
I knew this was going to happen. Right before Peso Pluma came in, Nata was already a global artist. He was known in Spain, Chile, Argentina, but the music wasn’t charting as high as it is today. Peso Pluma won’t be the biggest artist. There’s a whole lot coming who will be huge. [But] Peso is like the Daddy Yankee of our genre. He went and opened the doors worldwide, but here come more monsters. If you’re not focused on Mexican music right now, I suggest you do.