Why Warner Records Is Reinvigorating Reprise: ‘Artists Should Be Free to Be Exactly Who They Are’

Trending on Billboard The music industry loves its history. The business is full of iconic names with decades of history: Columbia, Capitol, Atlantic, RCA, Warner and Island are all labels with venerable pasts and formidable presents, many of which are also associated with powerful and lauded founders and executives through the years. In the past year alone, several iconic imprints of the past have been revived such as Jive and Uptown, while the Virgin Music and Mercury Records brands have been relaunched to great success within the past half decade, to name a few. Related One of those iconic labels with an iconic founder is Reprise, founded by Frank Sinatra in 1960 and owned by Warner Records since 1963, which has in its long history been home to a glittering array of artists like Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, Randy Newman, Ry Cooder and Neil Young, and more recently, Green Day, Deftones and Michael Bublé. But while its roster has always been diverse, the label has long kept to the ethos established by founder Sinatra and his longtime attorney and business partner Mickey Rudin, and set in stone by its longtime president and legendary Warner executive Mo Ostin: that artists came
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