NEAR TRUTHS: DIGITAL NATIVES

To get a sense of what the new Atlantic is, you really need to sit in a meeting with Elliot Grainge and his lieutenants, Zach Friedman and Tony Talamo. Hunched over their phones, the thirtysomething threesome seems to know something about every project—and what they don’t know off the tops of their heads they can retrieve easily. Name an act and they’ll tell you in less than two minutes what the last album streamed in which territories, if the label made money and the likelihood that the artist is still in the red. They swim like dolphins in the data flow.

The young Englishman, the scion of a music legacy who grew up in the business and absorbed it by osmosis at Shabbat dinners—as the saying goes, the matzo ball doesn’t fall far from the tree—is truly a next-gen exec, as are his amiable, streetwise friends from Philly.

We’d love to be a fly on the wall for that Coldplay meeting and watch the trio’s dog-and-pony show as they flood the zone with information. The bottom line: Chris Martin and crew, with an album shipping next week, expect a #1 chart debut. With SEA expected to be in the 25-30k range, will Atlantic’s young triad pull a D2C rabbit out of its collective hat? It’s no easy feat for a legacy rock act with minimal streams, but (for reasons of prestige, not money) that chart-topping week means a lot to artists—and they look to their labels to deliver it. It’ll be an early test of Team Elliot’s artist-relations and lever-pulling capabilities, but observers believe he and his team are more than up to that task.

The larger question pertains to how the new-school data swimmers will build their perfect wave in a legacy ocean like Atlantic. They say that they have the creative chops to bring this modern vision to a storied company, much as has been done at Warner and Island. How might their approach move the needle for the top acts on the AMG roster? They and group chief Robert Kyncl have judiciously reconfigured Atlantic’s enormous staff—now headquartered in L.A., the creative heart of the biz—and it’s expected that they’ll make good use of the experienced players behind the label’s biggest successes.

These include, among others, West Coast prez Kevin Weaver (the ST wiz behind Barbie, Twisters and more); longtime A&R exec Craig Kallman (now collecting new records from Cardi B, Jack Harlow and Burna Boy); the Hip-Hop/R&B/Global team of Lanre Gaba, Lu Mota and Marsha St. Hubert (who ran herd on the label’s big rap success, including Cardi B, Harlow, Lil Uzi, et al.); and the Pop & Rock A&R team led by Brandon Davis and Jeff Levin, in tandem with marketing exec Marisa Aron (Lizzo, Charli xcx, Charlie Puth).

The affiliated labels will all function under a shared-services umbrella, as Grainge and Kyncl hope a leaner-meaner structure comports with present exigencies.