GHAZI SHAMI

“People don’t understand the value of touring. TikTok is amazing. Instagram is amazing. But there’s still something to be said about touching people directly.”

— Ghazi Shami

Ghazi Shami is best known as the founder of EMPIRE, an innovative label and distribution company whose roster includes hip-hop up-andcomers and dignitaries like Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, and Anderson Paak. At XP Music Futures Day Program, he shared lessons from his career in Innovative Tools to Monetize and Protect Your Music: in conversation with Ghazi Shami. Relentless curiosity at the intersection of science and creativity has motivated him since his teenage years:

“I was probably about 17 years old, and I had a summer job at a computer company. My teacher told me that computers would never be fast enough to record music, and we would always be on reel-to-reel.

So I went and scrapped my computer and pulled together a whole bunch of parts from the department and built a computer that was fast enough to get 16 tracks on.

That was one of the first times in my life that I realized maybe technology could liberate us from some of the pain points of creativity.”

Since its inception in 2010, EMPIRE has been a leading innovator in music technology. The company pioneered a custom interface for artists to upload their releases. It now works closely with artists to venture into Web3 technologies, fueling Money Man’s all-Bitcoin advance or the “metaverse-born” Teflon Sega’s NFT launch. This tech-forward approach keeps access in mind. Whether building an artist equity pool into the label’s shares of Riff or using stablecoin to pay artists in countries with banking challenges, Shami puts it: “Access creates culture. If you enable access, you make culture.”

With Palestinian roots himself, he notes that XP’s mission is “near and dear” to his heart. Asked how Arab artists might break through to global success, he asserts, “People don’t understand the value of touring. TikTok is amazing. Instagram is amazing. But there’s still something to be said about touching people directly.” He cites the “energy points” of the Arab diaspora in Europe and North America as a largely untapped audience for artist touring. He looks ahead to supporting the growing music markets of North Africa and West Asia. He and EMPIRE plan to sign more creative talent in the region and to share good practices “not only to invest in that [region’s] evolution but in being part of the change that we all want to see.”