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Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, Lorde, Megan Thee Stallion and More Make It a Hot Girl Summer for Universal Music Publishing
Female artists like Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, Lorde, Megan Thee Stallion and SZA led Universal to top summer publisher rankings.
But the past summer was a very different story at Universal Music Publishing, whose female writers and artists carried the season: Sabrina Carpenter ’s “Espresso” and “Please, Please Please,” Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather” and “Lunch,” Taylor Swift’s “Fortnight” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” SZA’s “Saturn,” Ariana Grande’s “We Can’t Be Friends” and “That Boy Is Mine,” Ice Spice’s “Phat Butt,” Lorde ’s feature on Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing” remix, Megan Thee Stallion’s Mamushi” and critical favorites like Clairo, Gracie Abrams and even the most female adjacent writer-producer in the game, Jack Antonoff. “I do think we’ve had a female-driven summer, there’s a lot going on societally,” says UMPG executive VP and co-head of U.S. A&R Jennifer Knoepfle (pronounced “K’nopefull,” rhyming with “hopeful”), who joined the company in 2022 after working with Gerson at Sony for some 13 years, and brought Antonoff with her. “That remix sort of kicked off ‘Brat Summer’ in earnest: It might have been the first time you saw two women airing their concerns and questions and doubts together in a song — I think it was quite revolutionary and a very real exploration of what was going on in their minds, and how they interpreted a situation.
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