SOUNDEXCHANGE PROMOTED COLIN RUSHING TO CHIEF LEGAL OFFICER. KIDZ BOP PRESIDENT VICTOR ZARAYA WAS NAMED CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER AT PARENT COMPANY CONCORD.N
OAH ASSAD FELL FIRST FOR THE
voice: a deep bass with the ductile
consistency of brown taffy, rapping over
sparse trap beats. Then he discovered
the voice belonged to a grocery bagger who called
himself Bad Bunny.
“Just from the name, I wanted to sign him,” recalls
Assad, 29 , speaking to Billboard from his airy home
on the outskirts of San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he is
sheltering in place with his wife and daughters, ages
6 and 2. “I loved the name.”
So does everyone else. Three years after chart-
ing on Billboard for the first time, Bad Bunny is the
most successful Latin music artist on the charts
today, with 3. 8 billion career on-demand streams,
according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data, and a
record 83 hits on Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart.
He closed 2019 as the No. 1 act on the year-end Top
Latin Artists list, and his new album, YHLQMDLG,
or Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana (I Do Whatever
I Please), has been No. 1 on the Top Latin Albums
tally since its Feb. 29 release.
Assad, who in 2016 signed Bad Bunny to his
nascent label, Rimas Entertainment, has also been
Bad Bunny’s manager ever since. Now, Rimas has
grown from a staff of six to 60 and opened offices
in the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Miami.Although Assad personally manages only one other
act, singer-songwriter Tommy Torres, he has over
100 artists and songwriters signed to his label and
publishing divisions.
“You go with the flow,” says Assad of his quick
success, speaking in a lazy, hard-to-pinpoint drawl
(his mother is from the Virgin Islands’ St. Croix,
and his father is Lebanese) that matches his easygo-
ing surfer look.
But behind the chill, there’s a relentless hustler
with sharp instincts and a business approach that’s
grounded firmly in data. Rimas began as a YouTube
aggregator that served as a launching pad for Bad
Bunny and others. Today, Assad regards it as a “ma-
jor label,” with similar global reach. And although
both Assad and Bad Bunny have been heavily
courted by the big three record companies, Rimas
has stayed independent, and Bad Bunny remains
signed to the label. (Assad declined to share the
terms of their agreement or when it had last been
renegotiated.)
Since the coronavirus outbreak, Assad has been
hunkered down at home, his first extended stay
there in years, he says. A dedicated baseball fan,
he’s using some of his free time in between a steady
stream of phone calls to play the PlayStation game
MLB the Show.You launched Rimas in 2014 when you were only 24.
What were you trying to do?
I wanted to be a major label. At the time, I would do
anything to make a dollar in the music industry. I
was a road manager, I would book artists, I had a stu-
dio and would rent it. We would create compilation
albums before the streaming era. Rimas was initially
created to be a music hub of some sort. It was always
supposed to be a label, but we didn’t expect it to be
a stand-alone, one-stop shop. Today, anything you
want to do, we’re there.Rimas first became popular among artists as a com-
pany that helped many of them make more money
from YouTube. What was YouTube like when you
launched?
I call it the “reggaetón depression era.” I managed
a bunch of artists from 2011 to 2014 , 2015. I started
seeing commercials on YouTube and realized that
in Puerto Rico, no one was claiming their assets. I
thought, “Why is that? Who makes the money?” And
little by little I realized that money went to the rights
holders, but there was no one on our island claim-
ing it. I met Mauricio Ojeda [YouTube’s music label
partnerships manager for Latin America, who was
then based in Colombia] in 2014 , and he was able to
get me the technology to claim assets for clients.Assad photographed
April 15 at his home in
San Juan, Puerto Rico.FROM THE DESK OF
NOAH ASSAD
CEO, Rimas Entertainment
BY LEILA COBO PHOTOGRAPHED BY ERIKA P. RODRÍGUEZ20 BILLBOARD • APRIL 25 , 20208market_ftdo_assad_lo [P]_27888438.indd 20 4/22/20 3:30 PM