LONNY OLINICK: THE HITS INTERVIEW

From working in indie-label mail rooms as a young teenager to shepherding AWAL into an ever-growing and globally diversified Sony-owned imprint, Lonny Olinick has always been driven by a passion for music discovery.

So it’s no surprise that when HITS cornered him for a recent Zoom conversation, Olinick was launching campaigns for two musicians who also happen to be co-stars in Netflix’s Stranger Things (Joe Keery, aka Djo, and Finn Wolfhard) and looking ahead to what’s next for AWAL stars like Icelandic vocalist Laufey and U.K. multihyphenate Tom Misch.

The CEO, whose roster also includes Jungle, Little Simz, Freddie Gibbs and JVKE, fielded various inane queries about AWAL from us and didn’t even hang up when we left mid-conversation to grab a sandwich.

How does AWAL balance being driven by data compared to the music itself, and the artist development that comes with it?

The cool thing is, given that we work with lots of different artists in different ways, there are always amazing music stories to talk about. That comes down to compelling data stories, but often, the music is really compelling and we're excited about it. The confluence of those two things happened last year for Djo and Laufey. That is continuing into this year.

We had "End of Beginning" for Djo, which was one of the biggest records of last year. That was his third album with us. He has a new album coming, a sold-out tour and an opportunity to establish himself as a career artist.

Laufey is at her peak creatively and is making a commercial impact on a global basis. Those are just two examples of that long-term artist development. After putting in real hard work, they’re now seeing the benefits.

Functionally, how does AWAL spring into action when something like "End of Beginning" starts to move?

The first thing is that you don't count on those moments. You do the work leading up to the moments and you sign artists that you believe in—not because they're having a viral moment, but because you believe they can build real careers.

But for Djo, again, this was a second record that he put out a long time ago. He’s played music for his whole life. He’s played live shows. He spent a lot of time thinking about the stories that he wanted to tell and put in the work. We start off from the perspective of, these moments aren't supposed to just be a moment. It's supposed to be something that carries you forward in a different trajectory than you've had before.

What is the creative story you want to tell? How do you make sure the marketing and the conversation you're having is additive to the artist, and not just for the song or the moment? That's where a lot of people make mistakes. They're trying to do everything to make the moment as big as they can, but they're not worrying about the integrity of the artist. Maybe you maximize the moment, but you talk to all the wrong people with all the wrong messages.

We go to every single place where there could be fans of the music and spread the message. That's DSPs, radio, press, on a global basis. That's on the Internet for sure, from social media across TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. Where is the audience that I can have a conversation about this moment and most importantly, this artist?

AWAL is a company with global P&L. Does that allow you to capitalize even more on something that's happening because you're not limited to any geographical area?

We’ve always tried to be very progressive as a company and ask provocative questions. What's the future of music and what's the future of a company that’s trying to support artists? One of the first insights we all had is, music travels in a way that is not geographically constrained. Stories and culture travel instantaneously across the globe. Djo and Laufey were the first big records we ever had where we got every single country in the world on the phone the night we started to see something. Our U.S. marketing team thinks globally. Our U.K. marketing team thinks globally. They're not sitting there going, how do I maximize this for my territory? They're saying, where can this go? And how can my partners all across the world help tell the story?

Why do you think artists who’ve had success at AWAL have stayed rather than chasing a big check from another company?

Distribution in and of itself is a reasonably commoditized thing. Record companies historically have been the places where super music fans existed and where really creative people existed. We started from the perspective that labels aren't good or bad—they're just different from the way we run our business. But we share the principles of wanting to build superstar artists and be creative partners. If you look at the company we started as versus the company we are today, now we have creative marketing, video commissioning, press, radio, DSP, sync and brand partnerships. We do everything a record company does. For an artist, you're being successful in that environment and you own your music and you're getting the largest share of the royalties that come in. That's a really fair deal. I'm clearly biased, but I look at us as the best value proposition in the business.

Laufey is one example. Djo, again, we're on our third record. Jungle, who we've had massive success with, continued to sign over and over again. Little Simz we've had for five records. We signed JPEGMAFIA. We signed deals without these artists talking to anyone else. Lauv just came back. What we do is very unique.

Some of your competitors might prefer to sign labels, but AWAL signs artists.

I've been fortunate to spend a lot of time with the folks at The Orchard and I'm blown away by what they do on a global basis. I look at it like, they're signing entrepreneurs and we're often signing artists, but the art of that is so difficult: to identify the people who are going to shape culture versus signing the artists who shape culture. The work is no less difficult or profound. We try to be a very A&R- and creative-driven company. I often describe us as a record label with a distribution business model. There is a record label at the core of what we do, which means we have really strong opinions. We pass on most of what's sent our way because we don’t understand it. And if we don't understand it, how can we possibly be the best home? It doesn’t matter what the data says. That would be inauthentic and that's antithetical to what we are as a company.

Can you talk about how foreign A&R sources have been a factor over the past couple years?

Paul [Hitchman], who's our COO, and I have been doing this together for almost nine years at this point. Being a solely English-language music company was not the right answer for us. When we were independent, we had a great partner in Kobalt, but we had to make choices about where we spent our time, energy and focus. One of the benefits of being a part of Sony is there's this global infrastructure that already exists that we can tap into. We've been able to realize a vision that we've had all along. One of the first things we did at Sony was figure out how to bring the AWAL model to a lot of other markets. Just in the last year and a half, we’ve added India, Nigeria, South Africa, the Middle East, the Philippines, Spain, Mexico, France and the Netherlands. The way we operate makes sense in so many of these markets.

How has the AWAL/Sony relationship grown and evolved?

Immediately, we felt like we were talking to people who spoke the same language as we did. They've had lots of success bringing in businesses and allowing them to flourish, using the model they already had in existence. Rob has been unbelievably supportive of us pushing our business model further and bringing it everywhere it could be, without any of the constraints we maybe would have had in different environments. It has been an unbelievable fit.

Overall, what is really working? And maybe conversely, what are some stumbling blocks that perhaps are going to require some innovative thinking to overcome?

You can get caught up in what is happening this year or this moment and what's happening quickly. I try to avoid all of that and just think about, if you sign great artists and you give them the room and the support, eventually you're successful. That's what we focus on: what have we signed and what have we developed and what stories are we telling? If I look at that over a multi-year time horizon, our company grows. Those artists grow and they're successful, and they stay.

That's the core of the business. That's never going to change. There'll always be artists who want to tell great stories, and who need a company like ours that is a artist development company. The way we find those artists, how we evaluate them and how we decide what to do with them from a marketing perspective, that's always changing. We have to have our finger on the pulse of all the different ways we can help artists reach an audience.

We have to be ruthlessly focused on youth culture and where audiences are and how they're communicating, and then avoid taking shortcuts. We focus on the long-term vision for this artist. The challenge that everyone will probably enumerate is, does the world really need as much music as is being put out there? Clearly, our perspective is no, because we don't work with every single artist in the world. We have a distribution platform that has 20,000 artists in a world of tens of millions of artists. We're very clear that curating a select group of artists that we think have something unique to say is critically important, and that’s embedded in the DNA of our company.

Tom Misch’s music got a lot of people through the early pandemic and has become a big live draw. Is there anything percolating on that front?

Tom is a prototypical AWAL artist, because he's a true artist who has such a strong creative vision and, live, is among the most compelling artists I've seen. He's definitely working on music and there’s some exciting stuff coming this year, if not next year. What I’ve heard so far meets the moment that he's created for himself.

The Wombats just scored a very high debut in the U.K. too with their new album, Oh! The Ocean.

The cool thing about them is their business is global and they've been doing it for a long time at a really high level. We put out our first album with them about five years ago and the business just keeps growing. Most of what we do is sign new artists and develop them from the ground up. I think that's the superpower we have as a company. We don’t look at it as needing to happen on any specific time scale. Often, we let it breathe and develop and we're there to be supportive and to nurture them.

Jungle has become quite a sync darling.

Our sync team is phenomenal, and who wouldn't want to sync Jungle? You talk about an artist who's put in the work, who understands their brand and keeps challenging the audience, but at the same time, is putting out records that are just remarkable. We've certainly helped, but the band and their manager, Sam Denniston, are so clear in their creative vision. We're happy to be along for the ride.

I know it's hard to pick favorites, but I'd love to know anything that you've personally been enjoying lately.

I'm really fortunate that I love pretty much everything we work on. We just signed an artist out of the U.K. named Chloe Slater who is unbelievably powerful. Ray Bull just released an incredible new EP. Luvcat and Hemlocke Springs should be on the radar this year as well.

Is there a mentor or someone who, in your ascent in the biz, really made a strong impression? Also, is there anything that you do to help yourself stay sane amid the ebbs and flows of the music business?

I always want to achieve more and do more, but anytime you have any semblance of success, there's a lot of people who are a part of it. At Kobalt, Laurent [Hubert] and Willard [Ahdritz] gave me opportunities that I probably didn't deserve at the moment. Before that, Richard Sanders, who was the GM of RCA, hired me into BMG's executive development program. He wrote my business school recommendation letters, and then he introduced me to Willard. He had no reason to help me. It was literally out of the goodness of his heart. I try to do the same thing as much as I possibly can because there's nothing more fulfilling than feeling like you can make a difference in someone else's world, whether it's an artist or an executive. Since I have been at Sony, I have been beyond lucky to work for Rob [Stringer]. I have lost track of all the times he’s helped me in these last few years.

We have an incredible team of people and we've assembled this leadership team that I'm beyond proud of. Paul has been my partner since I started running the company. Bianca [Bhagat] and Pete [Giberga] run the U.S. company, and then Sam [Potts], Victoria [Needs] and Matt [Riley] run the U.K. and, really, our international business. They're progressive, they're creative, they're innovative, they're music fans and the company doesn't run without any one of them. Arif Mahmud, our head of BA, is a super creative lawyer who adds so much to the mix of people. Ben Akinbola, who leads growth, has contributed in so many ways that I couldn't even try to list them.

I've had a weird career in that I grew up in music. I worked in mail rooms at independent record labels when I was 13 years old. I left the business for like seven years and had a real job. I guess I'm lucky that that context never leaves me. The thing that keeps me sane is how lucky I am to have a job where I get to listen to music and hang out with interesting, thought-provoking people. I'm the luckiest person in the world because I get to do something I love. Most people go to work to get through the day to then get to their lives. This is my life.