Amazon Music has announced that Phylicia Fant has joined the company as head of music industry partnerships, a newly created role. According to the announcement, she will identify and oversee strategic music partnerships and identify cross-entertainment campaigns for Amazon Music, She will be based in the company’s Culver City, Calif. office and report to Ryan Redington, the company’s vice president of music industry.
Fant joins after three years as head of urban music at Sony Music’s Columbia Records, where worked closely with such artists as Lil Nas X, the Kid Laroi, Polo G, 24KGoldn, Joey Bada$$, Lil TJay, and Chloe X Halle. Previously, she spent seven years at Warner Bros. Records, where she rose to senior VP of media & strategic development and worked closely with Prince, Andra Day, Jason Derulo, Gary Clark Jr., Drake’s OVO Sound, Gucci Mane, Saweetie and many others. She began her professional career at Motown Records, followed by Universal Music Group. Fant also is founder and CEO of the public relations and lifestyle-marketing firm the Purple Agency, which she launched in 2008. The company has worked with Swizz Beatz, Daniel Caesar and Luis Fonsi as well as Coca-Cola, BET, HBO, Hennessy and Red Bull, among many others.
She has also worked to include activism within her artists’ campaigns, as when Lil Nas X raised funds for the Bail Project through his “Industry Baby” music video. “Music is not a monolith, so we must truly foster allyship across the spectrum in order to yield the best results,” she told Variety last year.
Over the years she has won the NAASC NY chapter “Rising Star Award,” the Los Angeles NAASC chapter “Sister’s Awards Alumnae Honoree,” the HBCU Power Award, named a 2021 Empowered Women campaign honoree, appeared on on Variety’s Hitmakers list and our Power of Women/ Los Angeles lists as well as the 2019 Billboard Music’s New Power Generation: 25 Top Innovators List and its R&B/Hip‐ Hop Power Players and Women in Music Top Executives Lists.