Quiet Cuts, Loud Consequences for Black Music
Culture moves because people move it; our obligation is to ensure those people have each other’s backs as deliberately as the industry has shown it will not.
The pair of tweets by Amal Noor (Manager and Senior Director of A&R at LVRN) that sparked this conversation captures a tension that has been building for more than a decade. The promise of digital independence for Black artists versus the quiet dismantling of the in-house ecosystems that once championed their work. In 2025, a label can point to DIY distribution portals and direct-to-fan tools, claiming that the playing field is flatter than ever. Yet, the same corporations are trimming or outright closing the very departments—A&R, digital marketing, publicity, and brand partnerships—where culturally literate Black executives ensured that R&B, hip-hop, gospel, jazz, house, and every hybrid in between received resources proportionate to their impact. The contradiction is not new, but the pandemic-era restructuring spree has made it impossible to ignore. Universal Music Group began hinting in early 2024 that “hundreds” of recorded-music jobs would disappear to “increase efficiency,” an announcement quickly followed by layoffs that rumbled through its Black-music–leaning imprints in Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta.
One reason the cuts sting is historical. Long before algorithmic dashboards, Black A&R figures such as Al Bell at Stax operated as multilingual translators: they spoke the idiom of Southern nightclubs, church basements, and HBCU homecomings, then turned around and negotiated budgets, radio promo, and press on Music Row or Sunset Boulevard. Bell’s 1960s tenure shows how sharply an insider could steer the mainstream, from rebuilding Stax’s catalog after the Otis Redding tragedy to green-lighting Isaac Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul, because he trusted the hunches he’d developed on tour stops and in barber-shop chatter. That hybrid skillset (part ethnographer, part financier) remained a through-line from the mixtape circuit of the 2000s to the playlist wars of the late 2010s.
Representation inside the building was never perfect, but measurable. A University of Southern California study found that just over one-fifth of major-label A&R executives were Black in 2020, still below proportional representation, yet a footprint that mattered when decisions about signing, marketing, and single rollout were on the agenda. Labels, feeling the pressure of #TheShowMustBePaused, announced HBCU pipeline programs and “emerging-executive accelerators.” Warner Music’s six-week immersion courses and Interscope’s homecoming pop-ups looked promising on paper. But pipelines require destinations; when entire urban-music or “Black Music” units vanish, freshly trained recruits have nowhere to land.
Over the last 18 months, that destination has become a moving target. Atlantic Music Group let go of “two dozen” staffers in February 2024, framing the layoffs as a bid for “maximum impact,” then returned for a deeper round when leadership handed the keys to a new CEO that fall. Warner Music, meanwhile, disclosed plans to eliminate 750 positions—13 percent of its workforce—in a pivot designed to “free funds to invest in music growth,” a euphemism that rarely signals more scouts pounding club floors. WARN filings in New York later revealed that 114 Atlantic employees would exit by March 2025. Across all three majors, the head count shrinks fastest where cultural knowledge outweighs immediate data: college radio specialists, street team leads, regional press coordinators, and the A&Rs who built rapport through banter, not spreadsheets.
What rises in their place is a dashboard-driven logic that privileges scale over story. Companies such as Instrumental promise to “automate scouting,” ranking unsigned acts on follower velocity and playlist saves, while Chartmetric’s A&R filters reduce entire metropolitan scenes to graphed trajectories and engagement deltas. In theory, those tools expand the talent pool; in practice, they encourage executives to wait until an artist’s numbers peak before investing, because a misread metric can be blamed on the algorithm rather than a scout’s ear. That safety valve incentivizes caution, not discovery, and the casualties are often the very voices whose early numbers lag behind their cultural heat.
TikTok intensified this feedback loop. Luminate’s 2024 Music Impact report calculated that 84 percent of songs entering the Billboard Global 200 first gained traction on TikTok, making the app the de facto filter for A&R shortlists. By January of this year, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld legislation that could force TikTok’s shutdown, label staffers described “panic” as they scrambled for replacement funnels. The problem wasn’t strictly marketing. For two solid album cycles, TikTok’s “sound-first” interface had replaced the nightclub, the campus quad, and the neighborhood park as the space where new Black music traveled fastest. Remove the app, and the scouting template built on top of it collapses overnight, exposing how little traditional development infrastructure is left inside the buildings.
That erosion reshapes what gets signed. A&R grounded in community once prioritized storytelling arcs; career-long growth built through mixtapes, regional radio, and opening-slot tours. Viral prospecting, by contrast, scans for spikes: a 30-second hook that can double as a dance challenge, a snippet the DSP editors flag for “meme potential.” The result is an incentives gap. Black artists who cultivate an audience offline—through church choirs, beat-battle circuits, or local go-go clubs—arrive at label meetings with real-world fandom but modest analytics, and thus slide down the priority list. Meanwhile, executives versed in Black lived experience, knowing which South-Side Chicago footwork night to attend, which Jackson State band tape is buzzing, find their institutional memory written off as “anecdotal.”
The independent route, so often framed as the liberating alternative, is hardly friction-free. According to Luminate, over 112,000 tracks were uploaded to streaming services daily in 2023. Chartmetric tracked 22,224 formal releases per day that same year, a volume that dwarfs even the most ambitious DIY marketing plan. Chartmetric tracked 22,224 formal releases per day that same year, a volume that dwarfs even the most ambitious DIY marketing plan. Spotify’s Loud & Clear disclosures reveal that fewer than one percent of artists account for 90 percent of global streams; nearly 12 million uploaders earned less than $1,000 in royalties across all of 2024. Independence is empowering only if an artist can cut through that glut, and the skill set most suited to doing so—relationship-heavy community building—mirrors the very expertise being excised from major-label payrolls.
Economic stakes compound the cultural ones. When labels chase the quick-hit metrics, catalogs skew toward ephemeral singles, crowding playlists with interchangeable mood pieces while under-resourcing projects that require patience: the next channel ORANGE, good kid, m.A.A.d city, or Dirty Computer. Black music’s lineage thrives on conceptual depth and narrative cohesion, qualities that rarely spike on day-one TikTok stats. Lose the stewards who understand that lineage, and the industry edges closer to what the tweet calls “turning cultural expression into content, and legacy into a trend cycle.”
Yet the picture is not unrelentingly grim. Coalitions such as the Black Music Action Coalition continue to pressure major companies to convert their diversity pledges into budget lines, mentorships, and decision-making authority. Start-ups run by Black founders are experimenting with community-equity models—fan-funded advances, touring co-ops, and regional sync banks—that recreate the scaffolding once provided by a label’s urban music wing. HBCU pipeline schemes, when paired with real hiring targets and the authority to sign contracts, could cultivate a new generation of executives who trust their instincts alongside data. For labels, the strategic case is straightforward: artists nurtured by culturally fluent teams tend to stay. Ye’s 2000s ascent, under the mentorship of hip-hop A&Rs, and Cardi B’s trajectory, shepherded by Latinx and Black women in marketing, both underscore how culturally aligned staffing amplifies revenue rather than siphons it.
The comments by Amal end on a warning, and the evidence supports it. Strip Black music of the personnel who understand its community roots, and you dilute more than spirit; you risk sidelining the next regional mutation before it has a chance to change the global soundscape. If the past 100 years prove anything, from race-records catalogs to Harlem Motown revues to trap’s march from Bankhead to Beijing, it is that Black music sets the temperature of popular culture. Labels and platforms that bank only on the freeze-frame of viral metrics will find themselves chasing yesterday’s trend instead of shaping tomorrow’s soundtrack. Re-centering Black A&R, in other words, is not nostalgia; it is future-proofing. The machinery may have shrunk, the buzzwords may have changed, but the simple arithmetic remains: invest in the people who live the culture, and the culture will keep paying dividends—in artistry, in community vitality, and yes, in revenue streams that outlast any platform du jour.
Still, structural neglect isn’t the whole picture. Even the most culturally attuned A&R can only do so much if Black executives rarely advance from mid-level to the corner office, and part of that ceiling can be attributed to our own ecosystems. The latest USC Annenberg “Inclusion in the Music Business” survey found that just 7.9 percent of C-suite roles across thirty-seven leading companies are held by people from underrepresented racial groups, with women of color holding barely five percent of those seats. Those numbers have nudged upward since 2021, but not because a tide of internal sponsorship suddenly rolled in; more often, the jump comes after outside pressure or a high-profile resignation forces the board to diversify its optics.
Inside the buildings, peer-level advocacy remains sporadic. In private conversations, Black managers describe a recurring pattern. If a young scout lands a breakout signing, the phone rings off the hook with requests for artist intros, yet when that same scout needs backing for a promotion, the calls run silent. Mentorship circles exist—the Black Music Executives Pipeline Program incubated twenty-four mentees last year—but they still rely on volunteer labor and crowdfunding in a sector that generated $19 billion in recorded-music revenue. Compare that to the formal sponsorship programs earmarked for white peers: leadership-track rotations, equity grants, and automatic invites to strategy off-sites. Until Black professionals adopt a similarly systemic approach to pulling one another up the ladder, the pipeline will continue to leak talent just as rapidly as it fills.
The accountability question is therefore twofold. Labels must restore the departments and budgets that cultivate Black music, but we also have to normalize collective lift within our ranks by endorsing colleagues for stretch assignments, pooling resources for angel investments in start-ups, and insisting that our wins circulate instead of silo. Coalitions like BMAC grade companies on follow-through, yet those scorecards carry extra weight when backed by a united front of Black executives who already practice the solidarity they are demanding. Talk of “community-rooted artist development” rings hollow if we treat career advancement as a solitary hustle.
None of this absolves the corporations that gutted their Black-music wings, but it does highlight a leverage point. When we translate informal networks, such as HBCU alumni lists, regional promoter circles, and studio co-op chats, into formal power structures, we alter the dynamics. Fewer bright scouts will have to decide between a plateaued day job and a risky freelance path, and more Black executives will sit at the tables where budgets are signed. That internal accountability complements the external fight, making it harder for any board to justify layoffs that erase cultural knowledge or to stall on diversity pledges once the hashtag cycle fades. Culture moves because people move it; our obligation is to ensure those people have each other’s backs as deliberately as the industry has shown it will not.