Market Share: 9.9% (current plus TEA)
Top Sellers
Florida Georgia Line, “Here’s to the Good Times” 1.3 million copies (2.2 million with TEA)
Drake, “Nothing Was the Same” 1.3 million copies (1.9 million with TEA)
Taylor Swift, “Red” 855,000 copies (1.5 million with TEA)
Top Tracks
Florida Georgia Line, “Cruise” 4.6 million downloads (original and Nelly remix combined)
Lorde, “Royals,” 4.4 million downloads
Taylor Swift, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” 2.7 million downloads
In a year filled with event albums from blockbuster artists, how did Republic Records break through with a roster full of new artists? By keeping it simple, and aligning itself with the right partners, chairman/CEO Monte Lipman says.
“We are completely obsessive about breaking new artists and take tremendous pride in our track record,” he says. “And when you talk about our incredible roster, it’s also about our relationships with people like Jason Flom at Lava, Slim and Baby [Williams] at Cash Money and Scott Borchetta at Big Machine. We would not be in the position we’re in without them.”
There’s also the Republic staff, which includes co-founder/president Avery Lipman; “franchise player” Charlie Walk, who joined the label as executive VP in early 2013; and A&R heads Rob Stevenson and Tom Whalley. And a thriving soundtrack business that last year started with “Les Misérables,” continued with sleeper smash “Pitch Perfect” and carried through the fourth quarter with “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (which helped break another hit from Of Monsters & Men’s 2012 album, “My Head Is an Animal,” at radio) and “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.” “These are things that impact pop culture, and we go into them wanting to know we can make a difference,” Lipman says of the soundtrack strategy.
The label’s 2014 is already off to a big start with the year’s first major release, John Newman’s Tribute, and carryover from 2013 breakouts like Florida Georgia Line, Ariana Grande and Lorde. The spring will see new releases from Austin Mahone, R&B singer SoMo, EDM artist Martin Garrix and alternative duo Phantogram.
For each release, Lipman says, the playbook will be custom-made. “When you have an extraordinary artist and a magic record and a magic album in place, we look for the opportunities that will find us challenging each other and thinking out of the box as much as possible,” he says. “When we had Amy Winehouse, she was an alternative artist by description but we broke her at urban — [WQHT New York] was the first station that played her [stateside]. So it’s knowing that no two releases have the same bag of tricks.”