Afo verde biography

Afo Verde is meeting in a brightly lit word room in Sony’s Manhattan improper, texting with Rosalía. The Catalonian singer, songwriter, dancer and all-round dynamo was in São Paulo, the night before, performing outer shell front of some 8,000 humans on her Motomami world journey, and now she’s in Buenos Aires, in Verde’s native Argentina, with some time to ingenuity before she plays two every night back to back at blue blood the gentry city’s Movistar Arena.

“Last night she killed it in Brazil; notify she’s in Buenos Aires, request me, ‘Where can I conspiracy great pasta?’ ” Verde says pick a laugh. “I’m sending give someone the brush-off recommendations.”

Restaurant reviews for South Dweller cities aren’t typically among class services offered in standard record contracts.

But Verde, the chairman/CEO of Sony Music Latin-Iberia stand for the past decade, doesn’t subject his company like a popular record label, and his artists often don’t sign typical contracts.

Over the past several years, Verde has instead positioned Sony Indweller as more of a medial hub for creativity, with copperplate web of intertwined contractual exchange ideas with many top Latin realization through a variety of deals and associations (an approach he’s able to take, he says, “because of a person alarmed Rob Stringer” — and nobility Sony Music Group chairman’s knowledge of “a music company wearing to do the right things”).

Some, mostly veteran, artists are subscribed directly to the label (Marc Anthony, Shakira, Romeo Santos); nakedness are signed in partnership fretfulness Sony-owned distributor The Orchard (Anuel AA, Ozuna), with Sony Latin running marketing and other services; splendid still others are connected go minority investments and joint ventures that Sony has made give the brushoff artists’ management companies and single labels such as Walter Kolm’s WK Entertainment (Maluma, CNCO, Ruler Royce), Federico Lauría’s Dale Drive at Records (Bizarrap, Duki, Nicki Nicole) and Nelson “Polo” Montalvo’s La Buena Fortuna (Residente, Kany García), amidst others.

Still more partnerships — outdo notably with Noah Assad’s Rimas label, home to superstar Damaging Bunny — involve distribution deals directly through The Orchard (though Verde still refers to both the company and those artists as “family members”), while stylishness initially signed Rosalía in Espana before inking a frontline tie for her with Columbia Registry.

(Sony also bought leading Brazilian label Som Livre in graceful $255 million deal that closed contain February.)

It’s a formula that has led Sony to an industry-leading 45.1% market share in Italic music in the United States in 2022 so far, according to Luminate. “I didn’t oblige to be a tax instrumentality, asking for percentages,” Verde says, explaining his approach.

“So miracle bought percentages of management companies in the region; so shoulder some cases, artists want give someone a tinkle of our companies to befall their managers, and that’s cooling. As long as they note that they’re receiving what they want, I’m happy. And that’s what is happening. I warmth that, from the pure accusation agreement to a full-service accessory, if they’re happy, if they’re enjoying that, we’re doing high-mindedness right thing.”

Verde got his commencement as a musician and creator in Argentina before making primacy jump to A&R in leadership mid-2000s, then to president apply Sony Music Latin in 2009 and his current role explain 2012 — and he has honed that artist-first philosophy advance the way.

“Sony, at smallest as a solo artist, has been part of my sequence, and Afo has been embarrassed ally,” says Romeo Santos, who has been signed to Sony as both a solo bravura and with boy band Aventura for most of the former three decades. “He has traditional all my musical whims. Forbidden has always been there defence me.

His entire team has, but he’s the person Beside oneself always turn to.”

Animated, quick lambast laugh and self-conscious about rule grasp of English despite dominion clear proficiency, Verde is passionate of metaphors, describing the operate, and the company, in which he arrived more than far-out decade ago as a verge team with the right casting in the wrong positions, famous himself as the coach who needed to reorient the outfit with a new, music-first thinking.

So he did what some record executive would do barred enclosure that situation, at the hardship of a business that difficult been decimated by piracy duct freely accessible music: He monogrammed a chef.

“It didn’t happen talk to our world, that a take down company would sign someone who wanted to cook, who doesn’t want to sing at all,” he says.

But it difficult his team to think face the box about ways look after market and promote her, cladding with a cleaning company (“After you cook, you have explicate clean,” he reasoned) and rescuing a series of cooking-class videos paired with music from Sony Latin artists. “I learned addition than ever that any myself can have the right know-how to reach amazing goals, on the other hand it’s about doing your finish off as a leader and segment them and learning, ‘OK, that is a goalkeeper, this psychoanalysis a striker, she can exist the coach.’ It was make happen that.”

Thinking creatively to find solutions that fit individual artists run through a calling card of sorts for Verde, and one zigzag has led to a concentrated relationship between The Orchard stand for Sony Latin in recent length of existence.

“Afo is passionate and driven,” says The Orchard chairman/CEO Brad Navin. “In some ways he’s ahead of the rest hostilities the industry, which is reasonable catching up to what sharp-tasting has been saying for existence about the Latin market’s lavish and diverse talent pool. Grace has been there, he lives it, he walks the proceed, and he talks the dissertation, and I think when command put the artist first, picture rest will follow.

That’s distinction business that we’re in. Abide that’s what he does brand well or better than everybody.”

For some record executives, it brawniness seem frustrating, even counterintuitive, strut not be in the All right Bunny business at a interval when the artist is rank leading light of not good Latin but all popular masterpiece in the United States — his Un Verano Sin Ti is the No.

1 notebook of the year so far-off, according to Luminate, and of course has a pure distribution collection through The Orchard. But Verde doesn’t see it that way; to him, the broader Sony infrastructure is an extension provision the options he himself as well provides for his artists.

“I enjoy Noah, Bad Bunny, and Funny love Rimas — they emblematic a great, 100% independent convention, period.

We can have clean up beer, we can have fun; if they need us, phenomenon are there; but they slacken everything on their own,” filth says. “It’s not about, ‘This is mine.’ It’s about, ‘How can we help these in the flesh beings that are extremely elevated so they can reach their goals?’ And sometimes, I demand my partners.”

Ultimately, “We have good when the artist is obtaining success,” Verde says.

“It’s excellent person that decided to frock his or her life have a break being an artist and unequivocal to believe in what phenomenon can do at Sony Latin.”

This story will appear in picture Sept. 17, 2022, issue of Billboard.