Hitmakers' Executive of the Year Elliot Grainge on His First Year as Atlantic CEO, the Success of Alex Warren and the Marías, and Overcoming the Haters Jem AswadDecember 5, 2025 at 10:15 PM 0 Photo: Logan Mock Last year, when Elliot Grainge was named the new CEO of Atlantic Music Group, the move was controversial, to put it mildly.
- - Hitmakers' Executive of the Year Elliot Grainge on His First Year as Atlantic CEO, the Success of Alex Warren and the Marías, and Overcoming the Haters
Jem AswadDecember 5, 2025 at 10:15 PM
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Photo: Logan Mock
Last year, when Elliot Grainge was named the new CEO of Atlantic Music Group, the move was controversial, to put it mildly. It's not hard to see why: He's the son of Universal Music chairman Lucian Grainge — one of Atlantic parent company Warner Music's two main competitors — and his prior label experience was based almost entirely on his independent label 10K Projects, which found success — and often controversy — with artists as XXXtentacion, 6ix9ine and Ice Spice but did not have a reputation for building careers, which the storied, 75-year-old Atlantic wrote the book on. He was also coming in after the two-decade success of Atlantic chiefs Julie Greenwald and Craig Kallman, who had a nearly unparalleled run that had only cooled off in the previous couple of years, and Warner Music's treatment of Greenwald was seen by some as ungrateful, to put it mildly. Not least, at the time of the announcement, Grainge was 30 years old.
Yet 14 months after he officially took the helm, his success is hard to dispute. He was given a challenging task — not only to revive the label but cut staff — but the new/old team is clearly gelling. In the third quarter of 2025 alone, Atlantic soared to 7.83% market share, according to Billboard, up from 5.51% in the same period last year and 5.75% at midyear (a number that is skewed because this quarter is the first to reflect the company's acquisition of 10K and its 1.52%).
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Most significantly, the success is based on a combination of newly prioritized acts like Alex Warren, the Marías, Rosé (all of whom are being honored at Hitmakers) as well as longer-standing artists like Bruno Mars, Charli xcx and Coldplay, not to mention No. 1 debuts for albums from Cardi B and Twenty One Pilots. The label's wildly diverse roster also includes Ed Sheeran, Kehlani, Turnstile, Bailey Zimmerman, FKA Twigs, Skrillex, Fred Again, Burna Boy and Forrest Frank — many of whom are part of Atlantic's formidable list of 2026 Grammy nominees. Looking ahead, the label has big plans for recent signings Clairo and Hilary Duff, among others.
Variety caught up with Grainge — our Hitmakers 2025 Executive of the Year — late last month to look at his first full year on the job.
What feels like the year's big wins?
We've had incredible success on the artist-breaking level, obviously with Alex Warren, the Marías, Ravyn Lenae and Rosé, and we've also done some great business supporting the artists that have been on the roster a long time, like Cardi B, Kehlani and Twenty One Pilots. All I've done is assemble a team of Marvel characters that are better and smarter than me. They've done the most incredible job this year.
What's been most difficult?
You know, I think I'm wired to expect things to be difficult, so I don't have any shock when they are. We've had a great year.
It's funny, I asked your father that question when I interviewed him a few years ago, and he basically said the same thing. Shorter, though: "I never think like that. Just keep pushing on."
(Laughing) He's a pair of tough old boots. He answered it better than I did.
What do you think is a major label's role these days?
I have been fairly critical — actually, one could say a naive hypocrite — about major labels in the past. But after being in the chair for over a year now, If I could go back and eat my words, I would. Because coming from an indie and then seeing things from the inside here, I don't think the major label has ever had more of an important role in discovering talent, nurturing and supporting it. If you look at the top of the charts now, 90 to 95% of those artists are signed to or distributed through the major labels.
So why is that? Well, for one, we're the only crazy companies in the world that actually will invest in an artist with zero proof of financial ROI, purely based on belief and the energy of dreams: "Here is a check, we believe in you and your vision, we're going to help you." Majors are getting a lot of stick at the moment, that they don't do much. But it's usually people who don't work at majors who say that.
At both 10K and Atlantic, you've built so much of your strategies on data. What are you looking for in that data?
The numbers and data are important and we do care about that. But what we're also looking at is the why and who within the data. Why is this person listening to this eight times and not skipping, and who are they? What else are they listening to? Did they follow the account? Did they like a page associated with the account? We learn from it — and we don't chase things. Chasing data is a very cookie-cutter, very amateurish way of looking at the business. We would rather have a thousand avid superfans, who we believe we can scale early, than 100,000 lean-back, passive fans who may or may not buy a concert ticket.
Do you believe that superfans are a way forward for the music business?
I do. If you go to a market like Japan, which is 70% physical, an artist like Ms. Greenapple will sell 3 or 4 million records, and half the people in the industry in America probably don't even know who this band is. Those are real fans: They buy the merch, the tickets.
I think when streaming happened, the Western industry got kind of lazy toward fans. And what we're seeing, through the K-pop and J-pop fanbases and the sales of variants here, is that fans want more — Taylor [Swift] has taken a phenomenal page out of that book. I read that something like 60% of the people in America who buy vinyl don't even have a turntable — it's a piece of art.
Alex Warren was already on Atlantic when you arrived, but there was nothing to suggest he'd be where he is now. What did you see that made you focus so intensely?
Alex is a very unique artist because he understands the digital marketing side of the business and he's very good at it, but he's not defined by it. When we originally heard "Ordinary," we knew it was a special song, but it needed some time to really stick. And as we found out who was listening and who his fans were, we were able to work with him and his team very closely and build a campaign.
It feels authentic when people are vulnerable through art, and you can tell from his lyrics that he's had his struggles. And what's interesting about Alex is the audience: It's not just kids or of adults, it's everyone, from the ages of 14 to 100.
What did you see happening with the Marias and "No One Noticed"? That song sounds like nothing else on charts, probably for the last 50 years.
We saw there was a stickiness to a lot of their songs, and they were cultivating a real audience. I've been a fan of theirs since before I came to Atlantic — Maria has incredible star power and so does the band. But whether it was the team, the time, maybe a combination of both — who knows?
One last question about data. It seems like it can lead you to hits, but can it lead you to career artists?
When it comes to an actual star in 2025, I don't think data — at the beginning — is important at all. If you look at some of the greatest artists of the modern generation, I don't think data has made any material impact whatsoever in either the discovering or the breaking of those artists. I think a star is a star, and the data is there to help accentuate everyone's belief.
How involved is Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl in what you're doing?
I think one of the reasons why it works so great with him is that he doesn't get in the way of the frontline operators. I'm an entrepreneur, and being able to have that freedom for dealmaking and a vision of where the company is going, and not have someone breathing down my back but instead saying, "Keep going, keep going" — I can't speak for the others, but for me personally, it's phenomenal.
Your taking charge of Atlantic was not easy, and there are still haters. What sort of principles and beliefs and things you told yourself have helped you to succeed in that environment?
Look, when I was 13. I went to a school in Southwest London where there were very, very few Jews — I was the only Jewish kid in my year — and I had a quite a difficult time. It was also around then that my mother passed. I didn't have many friends — I was always quite a weird kid and, I don't know, maybe there was a little bit of subconscious anti-Semitism going on, or just uneducated people. It was a very, very, very tough period, between my mother being sick and then passing, getting bullied at school after my bar mitzvah, and I put a lot of weight on. I was very unhappy and I ended up leaving that school.
I'm not trying to do a whole sad story here, but I came through it, and there were great lessons in it. So to answer your question, things have been way tougher than this and will be way tougher in the future.
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Source: "AOL Entertainment"
Source: Entertainment
Published: December 05, 2025 at 04:36PM on Source: OPERA MAG
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