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Republic Records’ Monte and Avery Lipman on How Taylor Swift, Post Malone, Prince, Partnerships and Persistence Have Made Them the Top Label of the Past Decade
Republic Records's Monte and Avery Lipman, Variety's Music Moguls of the Year, on Taylor Swift, Post Malone, Prince, partnerships and more.
Republic and its founders, brothers Monte and Avery Lipman, have been the most successful label of the past decade because of their entrepreneurship, ferocious work ethic and the fact that they just don’t give up. That ethos is being put into practice with the Lipmans’ new roles as heads of Republic Corps (with longtime lieutenant Jim Roppo as president-COO), which includes the Republic label (under Goldstein), Island (whose co-CEOs Imran Majid and Justin Eshak are lighting up the charts with Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan after just three years in the job), Mercury (under Post Malone’s longtime A&R Tyler Arnold), Def Jam (under Tunji Balogun) and Imperial (under Astralwerks veteran Glenn Mendlinger). Tell me what you can do.’ He would say things that sounded so outrageous, but sometimes you’d have to let it sink in and think, ‘Wait a second, was that just short of brilliant?’ He turned this business upside-down: He was the pioneer of the bundle [with his concert-ticket-with-album sales in 2004], he wanted to eliminate the compulsory license, and he constantly amplified the message that artists should own their masters — in 1979, when he started, that was blasphemous.
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