When Elliot Grainge was a child, his father – legendary Universal Music boss Lucian Grainge – would take him into the office while he worked. “Subconsciously listening to mixes, listening to phone conversations about music as a very, very, very young chap must have stuck with me.”
Grainge junior went on to found an independent record label, 10K Projects, that established a niche “signing buzzy rappers”, says The Wall Street Journal. Now the 31-year-old has a much more daunting task. In October, he was appointed CEO of Atlantic Records, the well-known label now owned by Warner Music, and “synonymous with music greats” such as Aretha Franklin and Led Zeppelin. His mission is to position it more savvily for the TikTok generation.
Elliot Grainge inherits the crown jewel
The stakes are high: Atlantic is “Warner’s crown jewel” and both companies have struggled of late. Atlantic’s market share in new music more than halved last year from 2019. The shares in parent company Warner (owned by the Ukrainian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik) are down by around 40% from their 2021 peak. Grainge has the ear of Blavatnik – the latter’s son, Val, who sits on Warner’s board, is an old friend and they plan to work together to rebuild the label. But some music analysts are sceptical about Grainge’s prospects.
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Grainge, who is married to Lionel Ritchie’s daughter, Sophia, has been steeped in music since birth. “I was a weird kid who used to read the music trades,” he told Variety in a 2019 profile. Growing up in London, he established a particularly close bond with his father after his mother entered a coma in childbirth and died some years later, notes Town & Country. There were perks to being the son of a music-industry boss. Take That famously performed at Grainge’s bar mitzvah, and he has known Sofia Richie since they were children. It also gave him a more transatlantic outlook. The family moved to the US when he was 16, and he studied sociology and economics at Northeastern University in Boston, while promoting shows for other college students in the area.
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“Around 2016, that effort morphed into – and helped fund – a new label,” says The Wall Street Journal. The name is a reference to the number of hours of practice Malcolm Gladwell suggests is required to become an expert in something. But the company’s growth was explosive. Early on, Grainge signed an emerging artist named Trippie Redd, seven of whose albums made the top five of the Billboard 200. He was just one of many up-and-comers that Grainge bet on as “10K rode the wave of independence brought on by the streaming era”.
When Warner’s CEO Robert Kyncl was on the hunt for new blood in 2021, 10K Projects seemed the obvious choice. That year, Grainge – who had never taken on outside investment – sold a 51% stake for $102 million. He proved his worth almost immediately. Soon after striking the Warner deal, he signed up the British artist Artemas after a 12-second chorus on TikTok went viral. The resulting I Like the Way You Kiss Me was streamed more than a billion times on Spotify in less than a year.
Rare spirit
“Considering what we’ve been through together personally, in some ways he’s like the twin brother I never had,” observed Lucian Grainge of his son. Now they find themselves in competitive camps at a time of great flux in the industry. But the similarities shine through. “What I noticed about my father’s negotiating style was how transparent, honest and sensible he is,” said Elliot in 2019. Friends consider him a chip off the old block. “The music industry was invented by entrepreneurs” who “ran through walls for artists they believed in,” says Val Blavatnik. It’s a “rare” spirit. “I believe Elliot has it.”
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