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Rainy Monday mornings are rarely settings for celebration. But on this one, The Orchard CEO Brad Navin has 48,000 reasons to smile: The vinyl edition of Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS has finally shipped, returning the album to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with the largest vinyl sales week since Luminate began tracking data in 1991.
It’s the Puerto Rican star’s fourth straight Billboard 200 chart-topper, all of which have been released through his label, Rimas, in partnership with The Orchard, the services company that launched as a digital distributor in 1997. After an initial investment in 2012, Sony bought The Orchard outright in 2015, and since — through smart mergers and competitive acquisitions of companies like IODA, RED and AWAL, as well as a global outlook and a top-tier services offering — it has become the U.S. market leader among all distribution companies, boasting an 8.9% current market share for 2025 through May 15, according to Luminate, nearly triple its next-closest competitor.

For the past 15 years, Navin — who joined the company initially in 2003, rising to interim CEO in 2010 before taking over the post full time shortly after — has steered that ship, navigating it through the streaming revolution, the globalization of the business and, more recently, the democratization of music that has led to distribution becoming the industry’s hottest sector, with dozens of new startups and millions in private equity funding flooding the space.

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Still, as Navin notes, “No one has invested in the independent sector more than The Orchard has in the last 15-plus years. We have helped our clients sign artists, grow their business, grow rights within their business, expand where their business might be located — there is not a client in The Orchard that has not grown dramatically while they’ve been with us.”

From the start, The Orchard did things differently. Co-founders Richard Gottehrer and Scott Cohen started the company years before the iTunes Store revolutionized digital downloads and quickly took a global approach. “For years, it was difficult for independent artists to get noticed and get distribution, and early on, we realized it almost didn’t matter where you were from or what language you were speaking — music was music,” Gottehrer says. “It’s a universal language and sharing that was important.”

The past decade has proved that to be prescient: In April, the RIAA reported that Latin music revenue in the United States surpassed $1 billion for the third straight year, and The Orchard is on the front lines of that through partnerships with Rimas (which itself recently bought a stake in Dale Play), Double P Records and the recent acquisition of Altafonte. The company, which maintains 50 offices on six continents, “gives you the tools to think big and not be restricted in your deal or resources,” says George Prajin, who co-founded Double P Records with Peso Pluma.

“[They] prioritize making sure that their partners can reach everyone worldwide,” says Tunde Balogun, co-founder and CEO of LVRN, which signed a distribution deal with The Orchard after exiting its joint venture with Interscope Records. “Whether it’s a genre or a region, it’s amazing to experience how they partner with entrepreneurs and artists and back them and help them grow.”

And as part of Sony, The Orchard has only strengthened its position. “A lot of the new companies springing up in the space are owned by investment vehicles or backed by finance money, and it’s not really clear what their long-term proposal is,” The Orchard president/COO Colleen Theis says. “We serve the independent community, and that’s always going to be our client base and our focus.”

With this proposition, The Orchard continues to attract new clients, from traditional partnerships to its 2022 investment in Rimas to taking stakes in Fat Possum and Mass Appeal. “Sometimes modern automation tricks us into believing these service providers are all the same, but when done right, it’s a far more complex operation than most people realize,” says Tyler Blatchley, co-founder of Black 17 Media, in which The Orchard has taken a minority stake.

“The deals we’ve done over the years have always been very strategic: a specific genre, a specific region of the world, a specific synergy or enhancing the value proposition that’s going to benefit our clients and our reach,” Navin says. “Is there a great operator or a great entrepreneur there that we want to be a part of what we’re doing? That’s where my motivation lies and that’s how we’ve done our deals historically: working with great operators.”

Brad Navin with Mass Appeal CEO Peter Bittenbender (left) and co-founder Nas.

Courtesy of The Orchard

You’ve been at The Orchard for more than 20 years. What was it like when you first got here?

We were a digital distributor before there was digital. It was pre-iTunes, let alone iPhone. I give the founders, Richard Gottehrer and Scott Cohen, a lot of credit — they had this understanding that the world was going to go online in some capacity. At the time, we were flipping over CDs and typing in label copy. That’s what digital meant for us back then.

It had to get more sophisticated to keep up with the volume and what was going to happen next. We wanted to control our own destiny, so we built around technology. And that became our great advantage because it taught us how to build a platform of services and the ability to integrate what’s next, without us needing to know what was next, necessarily. And that ethos exists today.

What did you feel The Orchard needed when you took over as CEO in 2010?

The team before me had the vision to go out all over the world — that music from everywhere matters. And now we live in a time where music from anywhere can stream everywhere. But we hadn’t yet built out our own technology. We were wildly unprofitable, we were in a terrible reverse merger from back in 2007-08, [and we were in a] total state of flux in management and what we were doing. And I came and said, “We need to build this out; here’s how I think it will transform the company.”

Sony invested in 2012 and then bought The Orchard in 2015. How did that work?

In the early days, there was some trepidation about being acquired by a major: Do they understand the independent sector? Do they understand all things digital and what’s going on? But as Richard said on the heels of the transaction, “We were bought by a f–king music company. Not by a bank, not by some people looking to liquidate.”

We had a company with the size that they are on a global level that was going to make sure that IP [intellectual property] was protected, that the value of music and how it’s going to be represented in a streaming world, or a short-form video world, would be represented in the right way, and that, ultimately, The Orchard and our clients were going to benefit. And that’s going to include whatever’s next, like [artificial intelligence]. As long as the creators are in the monetary chain and protected, I don’t know if I care what it is, necessarily.

Even in 2015, 50% of your business was outside the United States. How has that early global focus paid off?

To go into markets all over the world, where there are massively important catalogs and repertoire of varying genres, was an opportunity. As the [digital service providers] began to expand their reach and launch in those markets, we were sitting right there with all this music already available. You’ve got to be part of the local music scene and culture for the value proposition of artists and labels and the local music services. But we also need to be able to move music regionally and globally as it starts to happen. And that’s the way we function.

You said distribution used to be the unsexy part of the business. Now everyone wants to be in distribution. What changed?

The independent sector has always been about partnership, pushing the envelope on marketing, or the next format, or new ways to promote. Basically, they’ve always been willing to f–k with stuff while the big IP companies want to hold back. And as artists become empowered, they start to question: “What’s the definition of a label? What do I need going forward?” That’s a big reason why the industry’s been shifting. The definition of a label, or an artist services company, or a distribution company — it’s all in flux.

What are you focused on now?

If I think about North America, in this last year, Kelsea Ballerini on Black River Entertainment is an example of how the independent sector supports artist development. You could say the same thing in a completely different form for G*59 and $uicideboy$ and their roster. Music that I think the industry wasn’t really aware of but their fans were aware of, that’s the power of the artist being able to be out there, building audiences and driving it forward — it’s stunning. Black 17 and the whole phonk thing that’s been going on — when you work with great entrepreneurs all over the world, there’s new categories of music that we didn’t go out and look for that are happening. This is what’s going on in our sector of the business that’s so exciting.

How many different levels of service do you offer?

It’s not just the different levels. If they want us to f–k off and just put their music out, we can do that. If they want us to hold hands and really be in bed working up to that street date, we’ll do that. There’s no one size fits all at all. There can’t be.

Does that affect the deals you do, to keep them flexible?

To some degree, but not to a wide degree. The influx of outside capital into the music industry the last 10 years, and large competitors being born out of other majors or large, stand-alone distribution companies, whatever you want to call it — competition is great. We thrive off of it. Imitation is the best form of flattery. What is concerning, though, is … there’s a lot of irresponsible deals that have entered the marketplace: low margin, high capitalization. The artists deserve to be in control. They deserve to get paid.

This story appears in the June 7, 2025, issue of Billboard.