TuneCore brings industry to indie

Phillana Williams returns to reignite Atlanta’s music city rep with tech appeal

Phillana Williams is in the zone on Edgewood Avenue. No sooner than she turns down the volume on the booming speakers inside TuneCore for our scheduled sit-down, the conversation gets interrupted by a loud passerby on the sidewalk outside.

“That’s Edgewood, but I love it,” says the recently installed VP of label services for the digital music distributor. TuneCore recently expanded its global reach with an office located amid the bustle of Old Fourth Ward inside Space 2, right next door to Sound Table. And it’s the perfect location for Williams’ open-door policy. “This is where we’re supposed to be,” she says. “We purposely chose this area.”

Setting up a hub in the thick of things makes sense for a brand built on bridging independent music culture and the digital space. It’s also a validation of Atlanta’s continued viability as a major industry player, despite the city’s lukewarm embrace in years past.

Williams’ own history in Atlanta runs deep. The Houston native started with the Atlanta’s original hip-hop station Hot 97.5 (now Hot 107.9) back when budding on-air personalities Lala Anthony and a young Ludacris, aka Chris Lova Lova, were still making names for themselves. Williams quickly catapulted from temping at LaFace Records to director of marketing at the storied label when L.A. Reid offered her the position to counter Sean Combs, who had hired her for the same position at Bad Boy in New York. During her time at LaFace — and later Arista when Reid transitioned to New York — Williams helped turn Atlanta talent into global superstars. While overseeing marketing for Pink (Can’t Take Me Home, Missundaztood), Usher (8701, Confessions), and OutKast (Speakerboxxx/The Love Below), she contributed to combined sales of nearly 50 million records.

The industry shift to digital eventually brought Williams to TuneCore, where she works to produce results for the distributor’s 200,000 independent artists.

But TuneCore is not a label. It doesn’t retain ownership of artists’ masters or sign them to restrictive 360 deals. Instead it offers comparable services, such as advance money for marketing and promotions in exchange for royalty splits shared with member artists. It’s also the best known route for unsigned artists — including Drake and Ed Sheeran — before their major label deals to get their music on iTunes, Spotify, Rhapsody, Pandora, Google Play, and other major platforms.

Which begs the question: Why establish a brick-and-mortar headquarters for label services in Atlanta?

“The craziest thing is that it was an international decision,” Williams says. Though TuneCore has offices in Austin, Los Angeles, Nashville, and its home base in Brooklyn, “it was imperative to have a presence here” — especially after the distributor was acquired last year by French-owned Believe Digital, a former rival, to give the company a competitive boost in the global market. “Atlanta is known around the world as the epicenter for music,” she says.

While film and tech continue to emerge as the new powerhouses within Atlanta’s creative economy, it’s the city’s music legacy that paved the way, often without the city’s support.

“I feel like the city has failed the music business,” says Williams, who also managed Grammy winning artist Miguel and furthered the careers of Erykah Badu and Chrisette Michele as senior VP of marketing and artist development at Motown Records before coming to TuneCore. “The artists have risen to the occasion, and actually sustained, without the support of the city.”

While L.A. Reid’s move to New York in the early 2000s left a gaping hole in Atlanta’s music industry leadership, the city and state failed to capitalize on its biggest cultural export during that same period. As the first creative industry to usher in the new millennium, music never received the tax breaks currently buoying film or the same level of civic investment benefitting tech.

Meanwhile, a town like Nashville is using its longtime country music cachet to catapult a burgeoning tech scene. During a recent visit to her TuneCore counterpart in Nashville, Williams was blown away by the economic development on Music Row. “It’s a little embarrassing that Atlanta does not have that,” she says. “They’ve marketed it, they’ve branded it. We used to hold the title ‘music city’ and now that really is Nashville.”

“But I say that to say, we can be that, too,” she adds. “We really do need the support of the city — and there have been conversations about it — but I think the music is stronger than ever here.” Williams says she can “feel a resurgence” since returning to Atlanta in recent months, and she hopes nurturing it will result in more buy-in from the city. “I think that camaraderie is needed more in terms of music executives and artists. It’s there but it could be better. We have to fight together as a team to make sure that the city is accountable to us.”

TuneCore currently hosts an artist showcase in the city every other month. As for its laid back digs on Edgewood, it’s the perfect location to create some synergy.

“We could’ve been in a lot of other spaces, but it was important to be here,” Williams says. “To me it’s the center of the new music culture of Atlanta. This is Atlanta’s music room.”