L.A. REID CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

Antonio “L.A.” Reid, who stepped down as Chairman/CEO of Epic today, has spent more than three decades in the music business. The Cincinnati native began his career as the drummer in the R&B group The Deele with Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, his partner in LaFace Records, which they co-founded in 1989, playing major roles in putting Atlanta on the map as a hub for black music. The LaFace roster included TLC, Toni Braxton, Usher and OutKast.

Reid was officially named to the post of President/CEO at Arista in 2000, replacing label founder Clive Davis. BMG President/CEO Strauss Zelnick made the move to establish an orderly succession at the label, but the move caused a firestorm of media attention centering on the forced exit of Davis. The company even sent Reid to Harvard Business School to learn the ropes of running a company.

While it lasted less than four years, until January 2004, when the approval of the Sony BMG merger led to his exit, the Reid era at Arista was an emphatic success, highlighted by the breakthroughs of Avril Lavigne, OutKast, Sarah McLachlan, Dido and Kelis, among others.

Three months later he became head of of IDJ, replacing Lyor Cohen, who split to join Edgar Bronfman Jr. at Warner Music Group. Reid’s reign at the label came to an end seven years later; he made his exit in March 2011, three months after Lucian Grainge took sole charge of UMG. Soon thereafter, he accepted an offer to become a judge on the premiering U.S. edition of The X Factor.

In July, he was placed in charge of Epic. Reid also did the first two seasons of The X Factor with fellow Sony exec Simon Cowell, leaving in late 2012 in order to focus exclusively on running Epic.

Reid had arrived at the label with virtually no roster to work with, and he proceeded to rebuild it virtually from scratch, signing and developing the new crop largely after his X Factor detour.

In 2013, Reid received the President’s Merit Award at Davis’ annual Pre-Grammy Gala, indicating that time heals all wounds.

That same year, Reid began to orchestrate the long-moribund label’s turnaround, initially breaking a handful of new acts—A Great Big World, KONGOS, Meghan Trainor and Fifth Harmony. He then doubled down on hip-hop, which began to bear fruit last year, when Epic scored #1 album debuts with Future, DJ Khaled, Travis Scott and A Tribe Called Quest, establishing the label as a hub for the genre at a time when hip-hop had begun to dominate the streaming platforms.

When, in a February 2016 interview with HITS, Reid was asked whether he agreed with the hypothesis that A Great Big World’s “Say Something” was the kick-starter for Epic’s turnaround and Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” was the hit that emptied the bases, Reid offered this detailed reply:

“I would say that that’s pretty accurate. But I would also add that, from the very beginning, we’ve had some incredible successes in urban music that shouldn’t be discounted just because they didn’t live on the pop charts. And we’ve been having those kinds of hits since the day I walked in the door, and that’s the truth. And with some very significant artists, I might add. We’ve been having hits with Future since 2011, when we first signed him, and we’ve had many, many hits with Yo Gotti, Travis Scott, Jidenna and Tamar Braxton. We don’t only regard success as Top 40—that’s not the nature of our business. We believe in all genres of music, and if there’s anything that I’m proud of in my own career, it’s that I cherish all genres of music. Whether it’s a hip-hop record or an R&B record like Tamar, a Top 40 record like A Great Big World or an alternative record like KONGOS, I value them all the same way. They are all important to me. Top 40 is not the only thing that matters. It just isn’t—not to me.”

In mid-2016, Reid relocated from New York to L.A. to start an official Epic West Coast office for Sony.