“It was pretty dire,” says Warner Records co-chairman-COO Tom Corson of his first few months at the label. A veteran executive who’s held senior roles at A&M, Capitol, Columbia, Arista and J Records, Corson came to Warner after a very successful run as COO of RCA Records. But even he was daunted by the task at hand, and his partner in leadership at the label, co-chairman/CEO Aaron Bay-Schuck — who he barely knew — was still under contract to Interscope Records and couldn’t start for another 10 months.
“I started in January of 2018, and in the first month, I realized it was going to be a much heavier lift than I imagined,” he recalls. “The label had been under different management many times in the last 10 or 15 years, and there had been a couple of hits but no real throughline in terms of an identity. It was going to be a long-term build.”
He and Bay-Schuck — Variety‘s Hitmakers Executives of the Year — can look back with pride, as the company has been on a hot streak for the past two years, with hits from Zach Bryan, Dua Lipa, Benson Boone, Teddy Swims, Linkin Park, Dasha, NLE Choppa and others. But at the time, they were basically looking at a gut renovation of the storied Warner Bros. Records, onetime home of Prince, Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchell, Tom Petty and many other legendary artists. “The roster we inherited was mostly artists who had been on the label for some time — Michael Buble, Josh Groban, Green Day, the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” Bay-Schuck says. “And we had a couple of hits after we first started, Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line’s ‘Meant to Be,’ Anne Marie and Marshmello with ‘Friends,’ and a couple of early success stories through our partnership with OVO, where Drake did some interesting collaborations. But underneath all of that, we were making some very significant changes to the roster and the executive side, and that’s why the rebuilding was more visible for the next couple of years.”
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Those were bumpy years, but over the pandemic, the heavy lifting began to pay off. The company had rebranded — to just Warner Records — and relocated to pristine offices in Downtown L.A. in 2019, the same year Dua Lipa, signed in the U.K., became a multiplatinum global success and won the best new artist Grammy. The staff began to gell, and more importantly, so did new artists, following the leaders’ edict of “sign artists, not songs.”
By the second half of 2022, Zach Bryan and Omar Apollo had exploded, and the company was incubating several additions to this regime’s ongoing streak of nine Grammy best new artist nominees. “We signed Teddy Swims before he had ever put out an original song,” Bay-Schuck says. “We signed Benson Boone before he’d put out any music. We signed Zach Bryan before he’d ever done shows and was still an active member of the Navy. And Dasha only had an EP that had been out for a few short weeks.” Add in established artists like Linkin Park — whose meticulously orchestrated comeback was somehow kept under wraps for two years — and Cher, and Warner is suddenly a company with a deep and musically diverse roster, with more to come.
“The real joy of this business is going from the meeting where the artist is telling you about their goals and dreams, and then seeing them fulfilled,” Corson concludes. “You can define success by charts and revenue, but we signed NLE Choppa when he was a 16-year-old kid — his mom was going through the contract, line by line, with our lawyer, for two hours outside Aaron’s office, while Choppa was shooting the shit with our team. He was in the office yesterday, looking at all his plaques, and saying, ‘Six years ago, I was sitting there as a 16-year-old, and look at how far I’ve come.’ He’s accumulated 9 billion streams and has 25 gold and platinum certifications, and still is not even a household name. What we do that in service of that goal and those dreams.”