“I was constantly told, ‘Women can’t be A&R people — what’s wrong with you?’”
“The more women are empowered, the more we’re going to see things change,” says Gaba. “I’m trying to hire more women A&Rs. I inherited an almost all-male department, and it just doesn’t make sense, with the music business’s half-female consumer base, to not have more women at the table when these things are being decided.”
“The way Clive worked was to have me and his entire A&R staff sitting in his office for several hours a day while he took meetings with artists, writers, product managers,” she recalls. “It was a lot of work but I learned a tremendous amount, and he was so generous with his time and his knowledge. And when [former RCA/ Jive CEO] Barry Weiss took over, he allowed me to start signing artists.
Unlike the others, Gaba has been with one company — Atlantic — for nearly her entire career, joining the label’s A&R admin department in 2002 after a brief stint at EMI Music Publishing. She moved her way up the ranks, and before long, “A&R people started to ask for opinions, and I’m opinionated!” she says. “I have a good ear for mixing, I’m good at corralling people and making sure that things get done, and the role started to evolve.
Although she got her start signing rock acts for RCA, she made her mark at Geffen Records in the early 1990s, A&R-ing and releasing pivotal hip-hop albums by such artists as the Roots, Common, Mos Def and Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA. Kwak’s track record is nearly as long. Before being named executive VP and head of Warner Records’ A&R department last fall, she spent five years running her own A&R consulting company, working with artists ranging from Spears and Maluma to Tiësto. Prior to that, she was at Universal Music Group for a dozen years, rising to exec VP of A&R for all of the company’s U.S. labels and working with Mariah Carey, Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Jennifer Lopez, Big Sean, Nas and Frank Ocean.
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