Ghazi on Empire’s Global Expansion & Latin Music Growth | On the Record

Global music has expanded far beyond its borders, with genres like Latin and Afrobeats reaching audiences around the world at a rate like never before. Live from Billboard Latin Music Week, Billboard On the Record host Kristin Robinson is joined by Ghazi, CEO/founder of EMPIRE, to discuss how he has grown the label from a hip-hop-focused company into a global music powerhouse with signings ranging from Latin America, Southeast Asia and North Africa. They explore why Ghazi invested in certain genres before they were fully monetized, and how visa and immigration issues in the U.S. are affecting Latin artists’ touring schedules.

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Billboard On The Record is a podcast in partnership with SickBird Productions.

Host:
Kristin Robinson

Executive Producers:
Diona DaCosta
Jade Watson

Produced By:
Kayla Forman
Mateo Vergara

Edited By:
Rachel Derbyshire

Kristin Robinson 

All right. Hello, and welcome to this special Latin music week live installment of On the Record, our music business podcast here at Billboard and SickBird Productions. I’m your host, Kristen Robinson, and I’m joined by Ghazi. Welcome, Ghazi.

Ghazi 

What’s up? What’s up? What’s up?

Kristin Robinson  

Give him a warm welcome. Come on, guys. Alright. Okay. I feel very honored to be with you here today, Ghazi, ’cause we’re gonna talk about kind of the globalization of US music listening. US music consumers are more open to global genres more than ever, and Empire has really pushed into global markets in the last decade. So I wanted to start off by talking about Empire. You got started in 2010. It was primarily hip-hop-based in the beginning, but now you’re in all sorts of markets. You’ve really pushed into Afrobeats, Latin music, even Southeast Asian pop. So tell me about why that is what you wanted to do. You wanted to globalize after starting in hip-hop.

Ghazi 

I mean, we started with hip-hop, but the first genre we moved into after hip-hop was reggaeton, to be honest. Um, I felt like reggaeton was suffering from the same things that hip-hop was suffering from, which was piracy. And it, uh, it made it look like it was a genre that wasn’t being monetized properly.

Kristin Robinson 

Interesting.

Ghazi 

But it wasn’t that it wasn’t being monetized properly, it’s just human behavior hadn’t caught up to subscription services yet in Latin America. And so I knew that it was gonna work, so we started signing reggaeton artists in 2011. But then what happened was I kinda got over my skis and I started signing big artists that started doing big streaming numbers, and then Sony and Universal [laughs] came and hunted all my artists down.