Every year, we put a lot of work in to make our goals a reality. 2019 was no different. We hustled, made connections, created new partnerships and more to try and be the best we can possibly be.
Check out some of the awesome stuff our team did in 2019:
Symphonic’s Footprint
This year, we expanded our offices to maintain the exceedingly rapid growth of our company. We opened an office in Nashville and hired Randall Foster to run it. Not only did we see potential in expanding to Tennessee’s music capital, we also took note of the opportunities available to us in Colombia.
So, we also set up a new office in Bogotá. We realized having individuals and presence in these regions would better position the company for success and enable us to continue our mission of being a distributor with a very personalized approach, and it did.
Then, we decided to extend our distribution and label services even further by creating a sync licensing division called Bodega Sync led by creative licensing veteran Jon Mizrachi, our Director of Sync Licensing.
Those weren’t the only major additions to the team this year…
In 2019, we hired Rebecca Graff as our first-ever COO to help oversee our rapidly growing team, and appointed Artist management veteran Brandon Hixon (De La Soul) as the head of our newly-created black music division. Our Director of Corporate Marketing, Janette Berrios, was elected to the Association for Electronic Music’s Executive Board for 2020, and our CEO, Jorge Brea, made the Billboard Indie Power Players list for the second year in a row.
Additionally, we launched our new, in-house record label, sleev3s. We also made sure that every sleev3s release is curated by genre experts and partnered with a charitable organization that both the curator and label owners feel passionate about. The first compilation under sleev3s is titled lwlvls, featuring artists curated by Jakub Alexander, our Senior Electronic A&R Manager.
We were part of some dope events
This year, we were thrilled to host our first Puerto Rico Music Industry Sessions.
We presented the first-ever RapCon event in Brooklyn featuring keynote speaker Killer Mike and panels from accomplished industry leaders.
Our 5th annual Vibes of the Bay Festival went down in August, and we’re still not over it.
We partnered up with A3C to sponsor and help create The Artist Center, a space for artists and music makers to connect, learn, and further develop their careers.
New and exciting clients joined our team
We partnered up with Bubba Sparxxx and Alexander King to launch a new independent label, 25/8 Entertainment. We worked with some amazing new clients such as Catherine Russell and Steel Pulse, who were both nominated for Grammy’s. We distributed never-before-heard records from Destiny’s Child dating back to their early days as Girls Tyme.
We made new partnerships
Everything we do, we do for the #SymFam. The new partnerships we have made over the past year have helped expose us to newer expanding markets and the latest innovative tech to help us do what we do even better. In 2019, we partnered up with Adrian Younge’s new label, Linear Labs, we announced our expansion into China and partnered with Jaxsta, MonkingMe, Boomplay, Songtrust, YouSee and Telmore Musik.
You could say we’ve got a lot to be proud of this year.
However, you guys are the ones that matter, so we wanted to end this by saying thank you.
We’ve put together a small video of our appreciation for the great talents that we’re fortunate enough to work with each and every day. Enjoy!
