Elliot Grainge is ready to step out from his father's shadow
LOS ANGELES — Last summer, over sushi at Nobu in Malibu, Elliot Grainge convinced the hottest rapper in the world to go into business with him.
Grainge, a 29-year-old Brit whose plummy accent belies the half of his life he's spent in the U.S., runs 10K Projects, an independent record label he founded fresh out of Northeastern University using a couple hundred grand he'd made flipping an apartment in Boston.
The rapper was Ice Spice.
"We spoke to her very honestly and said, 'Listen, we see what you're doing here, and we would like to pour gas on this flame,'" Grainge says now of the dinner with Ice Spice, whose song "Munch (Feelin' U)" — a deadpan kiss-off set to a minimal Bronx drill beat — had just exploded on TikTok. The song's viral success had drawn interest from bigger, more established record companies, according to Grainge, including Interscope, Columbia and Republic, as well as Drake's OVO Sound. "But I felt as though it wouldn't have been as cool for her at the time to sign to a huge major label," Grainge says.
His pro-indie spiel is a familiar one. In Grainge's view, a major is "a conveyor belt with 100 other priorities" at any given moment; it's slow to react and saddled with "mediocre-at-best product-management departments," as he puts it. An indie, on the other hand, moves nimbly and with utmost respect for an artist's vision. His pitch to Ice Spice, similar to ones made by countless earlier indie labels to countless earlier next-big-things: "You're the boss."
What distinguishes Grainge's critique of the major-label system is that it's coming from inside the house: Grainge's father is Universal Music Group Chairman and Chief Executive Lucian Grainge, whose role leading the world's largest record company has put him atop Billboard's annual Power 100 list a record seven times.
In 2021, Lucian Grainge steered UMG — whose slate of talent includes Taylor Swift, the Weeknd, Billie Eilish,
