For Zack Zarrillo, starting Many Hats Distribution alongside longtime label veteran Fred Feldman in 2020 was all about creating a dream scenario as a veteran artist manager in the music business for the past 13 years. “We started Many Hats with what I would want as a manager: to know that I’m doing my job well for my clients and also making them the most amount of money possible, while still getting great service,” says Zarrillo, who got his start running a punk blog called Property of Zack while in college and has managed bands like Knuckle Puck ever since. “Many Hats started as a way to leverage my management company’s artist catalog for their own benefit to get them the best rates and to not give up a crazy rate to a distributor.”

Feldman, who cut his teeth at classic hip-hop label Profile Records in the 1980s and 1990s before embarking on a 25-year run as the head of Triple Crown Records, which he then sold to Round Hill in 2021, had extensive experience working in the indie label world as well as a six-year run at Warner Music Group’s independent label group, and knew himself that the rates that artists and managers were getting from labels and distributors were not always commensurate with the level of service they were getting in order to thrive in the industry. “I’ve heard every pitch, I’ve sat in every meeting, been promised the world, and gotten very little back for it for a higher fee,” Feldman says. “At the end of the day, you could be promised everything, but you’re responsible for your career. So we try to be transparent. That’s part of what a partner should do.”

Now, Many Hats — which offers pure distribution to clients, but also label services, physical distribution, marketing, promotion and more as needed, in exchange for just a 5% cut — has passed a significant milestone: this week, the company is announcing it has paid out $50 million to its artists in just five years in business, a big number for a tiny company without any venture or private equity backing. 

Many Hats has done it largely through word-of-mouth, as well as through a hands-on approach, some savvy catalog bets and a focus on growing artists’ physical business, even when they may not have thought of getting into vinyl themselves. The company now has two label imprints, Wax Bodega and Tight Knit; frontline deals with artists like Hot Mulligan, Mayday Parade and Saturdays At Your Place; frontline digital distribution deals with acts like the Pussycat Dolls and frontline physical with Mk.gee and Quadeca; catalog distribution for Green Day (digital), Mitski (digital), Alex G (digital) and Weezer (physical); and partnerships with Crush Management, Monotone Management, deadAir Records (distribution), True Panther Records (manufacturing) and more.

“In the first year we did a million dollars, and that was cool,” Zarrillo says. “And in the second year we did a couple million dollars, and it just has kept on growing. So to me, $50 million just makes it feel like, this is a real thing. We paid out close to $20 million last year, and I hope we can pay out $20 million or more this year. We’re not looking for explosive growth here — we want it to be manageable for ourselves and for our staff.”

Why did you guys form the company?

Zack Zarrillo: I’ve always believed in artists owning their own catalog, parts of it, maybe not everything. The first band I managed, who I still manage, are called Knuckle Puck, a punk band from Chicago. We released three EPs before signing to a label, and the label wanted to buy those three EPs for $10,000 with a 15% royalty rate in 2014. We had those EPs on TuneCore, and the band was making like $2,000 a month. So why would we sell it for $10,000 to make 15%, when that’s how much the band makes in five months? 

That kind of kept with me. And I’ve known Fred since I was doing my blog, and we’ve had a really great relationship, and we’ve worked on a lot of different types of projects together. I used to sign bands to his record label. And Fred came to me and said, “Hey, you’re doing this thing, why don’t we make it something else?” And that led to Many Hats.

Fred Feldman: [After selling Triple Crown], I thought I was done with music. But I saw what Zack was doing with his artists, and Many Hats grew out of his desire to make sure these artists have a different income stream by owning some of their music that they’re creating, and we built the company from there. I come from a traditional label background, for the most part in the indie sector, but definitely had a really great look under the hood at the major label system. Zack comes from a management side, but also an independent label side, and I think we balance each other out really well and understand what the artist needs.

You guys have both seen a lot of changes in the business over those years. What was it about where the industry was five years ago that made you want to start this company?

ZZ: At the time for my management company, we had artists making over $200,000 a month on DSPs, just on TuneCore, Distrokid and CD Baby, and someone from a Universal label called me one day and was like, “Hey, why don’t we give you a JV here, and you’ll move all your catalog over, and we’ll take 20% and then you can take whatever percentage you want on top of that?” And I was like, well, I definitely don’t want to do that. But I called Fred, and I remember where I was standing in Philadelphia, it was pouring, and I was standing under, like, a coffee shop to try not to get soaked, and I said, “Hey, I’ve never really thought about putting all this together. I would probably be able to have more power in the marketplace when speaking to, like, Spotify or whoever, if I was able to say our catalogs are doing millions of dollars a year, vs. one or artist on Distrokid.” And he said, “This is a great idea, we should do this thing together, we should go to Merlin to have a deal to go direct with DSPs.” 

Given your backgrounds, what did you think artists need from a distribution company, and how have you guys been able to provide that?

ZZ: Digitally speaking, artists need to be getting the best rate they can, and even though we take 5% our per-stream rate is still better than CD Baby or Distrokid or TuneCore. I think you need to have human beings actually answering you, and not slow customer service, or AI chat bots. If something goes right or wrong, we jump in. A couple times a year, we have a song go mega viral in our catalog that we’ve had for years, and we work hard, pitching playlists, marketing opportunities, and doing really well on the physical side. We’re incredibly bullish on physical distribution and physical catalog, and I think that’s another area where a lot of managers or artists just don’t care that much, and we often are able to educate and turn no business into a five or six-figure profit business for artists. And while the digital business is easier, the physical business is really rewarding. I can’t tell you how much an artist who didn’t care about physical six months ago loves to see their records at Rough Trade. We have a lot of experience with physical, and over the last 18 months, we’re seeing that business double for us, and there’s a lot of runway there.

What kind of partnerships have you guys made to be able to offer different services to artists?

FF: On the distribution side, we talk directly to retail, we’re out looking for exclusives, we do a tremendous amount of vinyl manufacturing through plants all over the world, several hundred thousand pieces a year. We can just make it seamless for them. If it’s a project where we are involved in the marketing and promotion, we will build out a team, we talk directly to the DSPs, we’ll start radio internally — we can do the building blocks of getting a record off the ground for a smart budget. We want to pay people, so we don’t want to spend money just to flex our muscles; if there’s no return on it, we’re not in that sort of bells and whistles game. We listen to what their needs are, and then we build out an approach. 

There is a tremendous amount of our business which is plug and play, just the pipes. In some of those cases, we’re the ones looking at it and going, “There’s a physical business here. Have you thought about going to retail?” People are looking for community, and record stores are it, and we want to be great partners to them, and we’re doing listening parties, people are showing up in droves at these in-stores. We’re a music company, not a tech company, so some of these strategies and thoughts are a little more old school like the way distribution used to be. And that’s what we want to do.

ZZ: We’re a high-touch company. Every email gets answered. A lot of people are in the unfortunate assumption that, if we’re only giving up a small cut, the company’s not going to care or do a good job. And I want to say, no — we don’t deserve more than 5% for your songs that came out one year, 10 years, 30 years ago for catalog we have, but we still have to do a really good job. We owe you that respect. And because of that, it just travels. We don’t chase anything on the distribution side, everything is 100% word-of-mouth. Our business would probably grow quicker if we chased a lot, but maybe then we wouldn’t be able to commit to our standards. That has worked really well for us.

How have things grown over the last five years to get to this $50 million milestone?

ZZ: We had almost no overhead to start; I was the one ingesting everything, distributing everything, so we were able to run things at a very low cost while we eventually sucked in a lot of catalog that started to throw off slight profit for us. And on our label side, we started to do some more larger releases, bands like Hot Mulligan or Mayday Parade or Arm’s Length. Our business just started growing in different ways. And we manufacture vinyl on behalf of a lot of clients that we don’t distribute, in addition to some that we do distribute. Over the last five years I would guess we’re closer to manufacturing 1 million records. 

FF: We got lucky with a couple of records that really started to take off, where we saw the potential at retail. We had a couple of tremendous viral hits; the Pinegrove shuffle was something where the minute the signs were there, Zack was on top of management, we connected them with TikTok. We just connect the dots. And people were hungry for something new. Artists are starting to get their catalogs back, they’re in between management — we can really help them figure out how to best maximize their catalogs and things like that. So it was just very organic and very natural.

You mentioned working with some of these artists like Hot Mulligan — how have you seen them grow within your system, and just as importantly, how have you guys continued working with them, even as they’ve grown, and I’m sure other offers have come in?

FF: We got them right when they were coming out of No Sleep [Records]. We made an EP with them, we did well and it was the right record. That led to their first full-length with us, and that’s where it really connected. At the same time their catalog came in, which we treated as a distribution [project], we were able to go to retail and sell a tremendous amount. This band was playing 300-cap rooms; all of a sudden they’re playing to 1,000 people a night. And then after that first full-length with us, everybody came around. They had major label offers, they were getting better support, money, touring, merch, all this stuff. 

ZZ: All of our deals on the label side are one-off deals, and they’re all 10 years or less licenses. That’s what I want as a manager, right? That being said, that puts us at significant risk of losing bands. And Hot Mulligan kind of got a once-in-a-lifetime [offer] elsewhere. We just called them one more time [and they stayed]. And now we have sold 25,000 Hot Mulligan records of their last one that came out in August. That’s astonishing for a pop punk emo band. That’s real teamwork, that’s real cohesion. Most of that is on the band; we’re not here to take all the credit for that. But the stuff does really have to work in unison, and I think we’re all kind of batting above our salary when it comes to Hot Mulligan, the whole team, from the band to management to us. We have paid this band hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it’s proof that you can bet on yourself if you have the right team and you don’t have to just submit to kind of the assumption of, well, to keep growing, we have to go to a major label. 

We try to focus on two to six albums a year that we can really sink our teeth into, because we also don’t have the budget like a major or like a funded venture company to just spend wastefully. If we’re going to commit, we’ve got to really make sure we get it back for us and the band.

What does this $50 million milestone mean for you guys? 

ZZ: This represents that this business is possible. It’s possible to do it your own way. It’s possible for artists to make a livable wage from music. My favorite day every month is when we pay out a million and a half dollars or more, hopefully, to artists. And we take that part of it really seriously. Fred and I are genuinely very invested in the artists we work with being able to live off this. I think a lot of management companies, with better infrastructure, or a company like ours behind them, could have more of their artists be independent. That continues to be a real focus of ours, and another focus is just distributing more independent labels. There’s more to grow there for us, too.

FF: It’s something that was just an idea that we built into a business. We did this ourselves, and I think this is just the start. This is our year that we’re sort of raising our head. And I think we have a proof of concept of how this can work. 

There are so many distribution companies these days, and this is a part of the industry that’s evolving very quickly. How do you see the industry continuing to evolve for distributors, and how do you guys stay ahead?

FF: What we try to do is just do the best work possible. We can’t be concerned with everybody else. We’re in service of the artists and managers, and that’s served us well, and that’s what we’re going to continue. 

This story is part of Billboard’s Global World Cup Series, a collection of 11 cover stories which pairs top soccer stars across the world competing in the 2026 FIFA World Cup with highly-touted musicians in accompanying countries.

In 2025, Ousmane Dembélé and Ninho fulfilled their dreams.

One became a Ballon d’Or winner — a prize handed out to the consensus best football player in the world — without ever having been nominated for the trophy before. The other, who was already the artist with the most singles certifications in French music history, according to French recording industry trade group SNEP, sold out the Stade de France, the country’s largest venue — twice.

Yet few would have bet on either of them in the beginning. For the past 10 years, the two adidas ambassadors have been in a league of their own.

Because they never stopped believing in their destiny, Billboard France brought Ousmane Dembélé and Ninho together, virtuosos in their respective fields with similar trajectories. On June 16, Dembélé will begin to chase a second star with France, starting the country’s journey toward the World Cup; Ninho, meanwhile, is already back in the studio, working on his next album. The cycle continues.

Billboard France: Do you remember your very first steps in your respective fields?

Ninho: Yeah, absolutely. In my first freestyle, I was describing what we saw around us. There wasn’t much life experience yet, but I drew from what we saw, what we listened to as well. It feels good to look back on that.

Ousmane Dembélé: I don’t really remember my first match. I only remember one thing: It was my best friend’s brother who signed us up at the football club in Évreux. That’s still one of my best memories. I wanted to play football, but I didn’t want to deal with the paperwork and all that. We needed someone older to go sign us up. (Laughs.)

You both entered the professional circuit very young. How do you handle that many expectations at that age?

Dembélé: For me, I’ve only had one dream since I was little, and that’s to play football. It’s my passion. You’re carefree at that age — you just want to have fun.

Ninho: The goal was simply to be the best in your field.

Dembélé: For me, it was a dream to get into a youth academy and maybe turn professional. I didn’t really feel pressure back then — it was just pure innocence.

Can you each tell us your greatest victory outside of football and music?

Dembélé: Outside of football, I don’t have one, guys. (Laughs.) No, my family, honestly.

Ninho: Family, absolutely. The fact that my mother has a garden and that she can throw a big family barbecue. That my family never has to worry about anything. That alone is already magnificent.

And the worst defeat?

Dembélé: I’ve had a lot of defeats that hurt. The 2022 World Cup, when we lost to Argentina, that one hurt. Especially since everyone was waiting for us back in Paris. The Champions League eliminations with Barcelona. The next day, honestly, I didn’t even want to watch football anymore.

Ninho: My defeat is the start of my career. Things were a bit chaotic at first. It’s a defeat because it was managed like a kid from the projects entering a world he really didn’t know. There was so much to learn. But those are defeats that help you grow.

Dembélé: In the good times, a lot of people will revolve around you, but in the bad times, that circle shrinks immediately. It’s important to be well surrounded if you want to have a career, whether in rap or in football. On my end, it’s my best friend, my mother and my agent. They’ve always been there since the beginning. They watched me grow up; they saw me when I had nothing. And now they see me at the top.

Do you believe in destiny?

Ninho: Well, first of all, we’re simply believers. Some things just aren’t coincidences. It’s a chain of events. Sometimes there are bad encounters, but you have to go through them to arrive at a new encounter that will take you where you’re meant to go.

Dembélé: That’s the story of my career. I started at Rennes, then Dortmund, where everything went well for two years. Then I fulfilled my dearest dream, playing for Barcelona. And as if by fate, when I went to Barcelona, I had quite a few physical setbacks. On the pitch, I didn’t feel right either. Eventually, I signed with Paris, and everything unfolded like a dream. And ultimately, destiny made it so that I was crowned Ballon d’Or last season.

Ninho, in one of your tracks, you compare yourself to Ousmane. Can you tell us what he represents to you?

Ninho: Ousmane represents the projects, first and foremost. He’s a star who’s still approachable. Like me. I think he must experience it, too. Out in public, people must say, “Ousmane, what’s good?” There’s no distance. Ousmane is the people’s Ballon d’Or winner. He’s proof that with hard work, you can reach star status.

What do awards mean to you?

Dembélé: They show that hard work pays off. It’s also a great source of pride for us and for our whole family. Receiving a trophy like the Ballon d’Or, from Ronaldinho’s hands on top of that, it’s pure joy. And it must be the same for him with rap.

Ninho: When you look at the artists who filled the Stade de France before you, when you see every concert venue fill up, it makes you happy.

How do you keep wanting to push for even more?

Dembélé: In my case, in football, in August everything resets to zero, so you have to get right back into it.

Ninho: That’s why I compared an album to a league season or a cup. Because after the cup, you have to go through another whole cycle to win another cup. For me it’s the same. It’s a perpetual competition to make each album better than the last.

This story appears in the May 30, 2026, issue of Billboard.

Rubén Blades accepted Billboard’s Indie Icon award at the 2026 Indie Power Players event on Tuesday (June 9) at The Cutting Room in New York City.

Blades, whose career has spanned more than five decades, recalled arriving in New York in 1974 after leaving Panama following its military dictatorship and taking a job in the mailroom at Fania Records. “No one is successful without help and assistance,” he said, crediting the bands, arrangers, musicians, DJs and audiences who supported him along the way.

The honor — presented to Blades by Billboard‘s co-chief content officer Leila Cobo — was a fitting one for the artist, whose career has embodied independence. After early releases on Alegre and Fania, and later a stint at Sony, Blades eventually took control of his output, launching Rubén Blades Productions in 2004. Since then, he has continued to build one of Latin music’s most influential catalogs on his own terms.

His Billboard history reflects that impact: Blades has placed 23 titles on Top Tropical Albums — the fifth-most in the ranking’s history — and charted songs on Hot Latin Songs across three decades. His groundbreaking 1978 album with Willie Colón, Siembra, remains widely regarded as the top-selling salsa album of all time and a cornerstone of the genre.

Watch the full video above and read Blades’ full speech below:

Good evening. Buenas noches. Small words, and they are. My arrival to New York City in 1974 was the product of a series of events totally unexpected. I studied to be a lawyer, but left my country after graduating as a consequence of its military dictatorship. My family had migrated to Florida a year before me and were experiencing great economic difficulties, so my decision to come to New York was a product of desperation, not careful planning.

My first job was as the only employee in the mailroom of Fania Records, the No. 1 salsa recording label in the world. One of my chores was to label and carry a hefty load of LPs and cassettes to the nearest post office while trying to avoid being run over by a bus, a taxi or a messenger’s bicycle. To explain how from there I have ended up here tonight would take a while. So instead, my intention is to let everyone understand that my success also belongs to many other people’s talents. No one is successful without help and assistance. There are many who are more deserving and talented than me who simply never got the opportunities. Without the bands, the arrangers, the musicians, the DJs and the audiences who have supported my efforts through more than five decades, I wouldn’t be here tonight.

So thank you, Billboard. Thank you, Leila Cobo, for this distinction. My decision to use music as a way to present ideas, propose solutions, denounce evil, and document the lives of those who live and die in our cities has made me very happy. And as this ceremony apparently aims to express, It seems to have produced some results after all.

Warner Music Group has acquired Sureel, an AI attribution start-up. Through the acquisition of this company, WMG hopes to better track when their songs and recordings are used in the training of AI models or in AI-generated works.

A press release about the deal notes that Sureel has multiple patents to create “AI DNA” for every generated work from an AI music model. It claims that this can break down the generated work into component parts and attribute how those have been used.

“AI powers a large fan engagement and value creation opportunity for our industry, while making the human provenance of music more important than ever,” says Robert Kyncl, CEO of WMG. “Bringing Sureel into WMG strengthens our capability for protection, control and monetization and ensures that the creative community remains in control of its intellectual property, name, image, likeness and voice. We look forward to working with Tamay and his team to advance all of their incredible work.”

Sureel also offers intellectual property provenance, audit and compliance reporting, model optimization and AI business intelligence. The start-up is also growing its NIL (name, image and likeness) attribution suite to track how artists’ voices and performance identities are used in AI training and generation. This can help with policing voice clones, deepfakes, AI-generated avatars and other style replication unique to an artist.

Though the company is now part of the WMG ecosystem, Sureel will continue to operate as a standalone platform, according to the press release.

“Rightsholders deserve to know how AI interacts with their work, and to share fairly in the value it creates,” adds Dr. Tamay Aykut, CEO and founder of Sureel. “Sureel was built to make that possible, and with WMG’s backing, we can deliver on our mission at scale, building a more transparent and fair future and driving value growth for the whole music and entertainment ecosystem.”

The deal may help Warner uphold its promise, outlined in its announcement about its deal with Suno, which says that “artists and songwriters will have full control over whether and how their names, images, likenesses, voices, and compositions are used in new AI-generated music.”

AI attribution, however, remains a debated topic. While it is an incredibly popular idea in the music industry — given it could allow individual artists and songwriters to be paid in accordance to when their specific works are cited by AI models — experts in the AI field appear divided over whether or not it’s possible at this stage. According to Luminate, over 100,000 songs are added to streaming services daily, making it difficult to trace back influences on an AI model at the scale and complexity needed to be effective.

On Tuesday (June 9), the topic came up at Digital Media Association’s (DIMA) Summer Meeting at Pier 57 in New York City. Laurent Hubert, CEO of Kobalt, was asked about attribution by an audience member, and he said: “We cannot just dismiss [the idea of attribution] and say that can’t work, which, by the way, may be the eventual conclusion. Let’s say you find a solution for attribution, first you have to pressure test the solutions, you have to make sure also they are, in my view, done in ways that is as unbiased as possible. How you check for that, I’m not entirely sure. Then you have to think about how you operationalize, and we’ve seen tremendous amount of fragmentation in copyright ownership over the last 10-15 years, which has added operational tension.”

In recent months, WMG has announced a number of deals, including an April announcement of its acquisition of Revelator. Founded in 2012, the company specializes in digital music distribution, rights management, royalty accounting and real-time analytics. The company will be used to bolster the offerings WMG’s in-house distributor, ADA, can offer. In May, the major music company also announced a new deal with Paramount to create films based on their artists and writers.

Jack White lives to zig just when you think he might zag. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame star surprised fans this week when he teased his upcoming seventh solo album, the 13-track Frozen Charlotte, during the free online series Third Man Release Lab, in which his team does deep-dives into his Third Man Records label’s quirky release process.

The very end of the episode casually announced the project via a short interstitial video of a man in a silver skull mask dancing and shadow boxing in front of a “content” sign and holding up a placard reading “new album,” which cut to a shot of a white porcelain statue with a blue skull head. White also teased the album, due out on July 10, on his Instagram in a video in which he pours pink paint over a skull figure dubbed “Frozen Charlotte: Velvet Model,” which shows up in the video for the album’s new single, “Dollar Bill.”

In keeping with the maximum joyful chaos approach, a new YouTube account called “The Frozen Charlatan” — the name on the nameplate in the “content” video mentioned above — features a 30-second preview of the galloping blues “Dollar Bill.” A linktree takes you to two versions of the LP, Chrome and Blue, with the latter featuring a description of the project, which it reveals was recorded at White’s Third Man Studio in Nashville.

“Frozen Charlotte – the 7th studio album from Jack White shows the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer at his best; backed by an incredible band (Patrick Keeler on drums, Dominic Davis on bass, Bobby Emmett on keys) whose collective hand is scorching hot after coming off a tour of universally-acclaimed performances,” it reads. “Instead of resting on a ‘job well done,’ they went straight to work in the studio and laid down what became Frozen Charlotte.”

The songs, which include two previously released singles White performed on SNL earlier this year, “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs” and “Derecho Demonico,” are reported to be a carryover from No Name, tapping the same “raucous, raw and frenetic energy,” while bringing their own unique tone and feel. “Frozen Charlotte is an intense rock and roll punch with never far behind blues underpinnings…all of which fits right at home with long time fans while leaving an inviting open door to newcomers alike,” it reads.

The LP is the follow-up to 2024’s No Name album, which Third Man initially gave away to unsuspecting customers at the label’s record stores with no official announcement or traditional monthslong teaser campaign. Frozen Charlotte‘s artwork can currently be seen in White’s first art exhibition, These Thoughts May Disappear, which is open through Sept. 13 at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in London; a massive version of skull figure also loomed large on the set of White’s April SNL performance, proving he’s the king of the long con.

The other tracks on Frozen Charlotte include: “There’s Nobody There,” “Raising the Grain,” “You’ll Never Fix Me,” “Nobody Knows,” “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing,” “Thick as Thieves,” “All Alone Again,” “She’s in a Frenzy,” “Making Contact” and “Neighbors Blues.”

White will hit the road for a summer tour beginning on July 10 at The Anthem in Washington, D.C.

Listen to “Dollar Bill” below.