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A Waste Of Time with ItsTheReal

#194: Capitol Music Group SVP of Brand Partnerships Brian Nolan

A Waste Of Time with ItsTheReal

ItsTheReal

Music

4.8817 Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2018

⏱️ 114 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on A Waste of Time with ItsTheReal we welcome Capitol Music Group's SVP of Brand Partnerships, Brian Nolan, to the Upper West Side to discuss his time and work with J. Cole, Migos, Three6Mafia, ESPN and his own division at Capitol, seventeenfifty! A Silver Spring, MD native, Brian talks growing up a hip-hop fan in the melting pot of Washington, DC suburbs, the lessons he learned caddying for the likes of Alan Greenspan and Mike Wilbon, taking cues from his older brother, chasing baseball-playing dreams to James Madison University where he majored in marketing, finding his way to NYC for an internship at Rawkus Records, and how he focused his sights on the music industry. After a promised-job never materialized, Brian returned to Washington and to the golf course, and ultimately found his way into a mailroom, where he worked his way up from sending records to working them as a field marketing rep in Philadelphia. After earning his stripes putting up posters, Brian graduated to Sony Urban where he rode the tour bus with Juicy J, DJ Paul and Crunchy Black, helped their record Stay Fly go from 15 spins to fully taking over the airwaves, and saw them win Oscars and go Hollyhood. Brian remembers Jay-Z and Jay Brown bringing J. Cole to the label as one of three priorities from Roc Nation, and reminisces on the work Cole and Ib Hamad and their team put in to go from performing for tiny crowds and in conference rooms for small-city radio programmers to putting huge numbers on the boards, selling out arenas, and becoming a voice of a generation. Brian discusses how he took advantage of a ceiling at his radio job, combined his interests in music and sports, and fostered relationships with athletes and executives alike, using his skillset to make his mark in brand partnerships, and how he leveled up in his new role at Capitol, especially in working with Coach K and Pee at Quality Control. All that, plus stories about Ruben Studdard, Rembert Browne, Jemele Hill, David Cho, Naima Cochrane, Destiny's Child, John Legend, Ray Cash, go-go music, Freeky Zekey, Tiger Woods, and much more! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey, Jeff. Hey, Eric. How are you? I'm pretty good. How are you? Doing well, thank you. We've been getting a lot of questions on Twitter and Instagram, and you said, don't answer them. Save them for the pod. So we save them for the pod. Yeah. What do people want to know? At Lord Luck 16 asks, just curious to know how to move into Dan's room went. Pressing topic all week, keep up the tremendous work, gents. Hashtag my two favorite Jews. Our brother Dan, another of hopefully his favorite Jews, used to live with us, and then he bought a place, and he decided he didn't want to live with us anymore. Yeah, I mean, you know. So here we are with an extra room, and what do we do moved into it there you go yeah we i didn't knock down

0:39.5

the wall or anything so how to go it went great i didn't need too many trucks wonderful and uh took

0:44.5

me probably about 15 minutes is it different it's a little weird because so the the rooms are mirror

0:50.9

images of one another right and so my windows are all on the wrong side. My

0:55.6

closet's on the wrong side. It does feel a little bit like I'm having a sleep over in somebody's

0:59.6

room than they're not there. Do you sleep better because of the, I don't know, the window situation

1:04.1

or the bed situation or like the direction you face? And is your, is your feng shui different?

1:10.0

My feng shui is... Your pronunciation is different. Yeah. It's my is your feng shui different my fung shui is your pronunciation is different yeah

1:13.5

it's my my fung shui is on another level it's like pot-per-re yeah i sleep well because i always sleep well

1:21.0

big big on sleep there you go there's fucks with naps um and then we turned out my room into a uh storage room Yeah, it's a glorified shoe closet. We have a lot of great shoes. People love our shoes. Yeah, I don't find myself going over there anymore. Well, I mean, I stick to my side of the apartment. Yeah. I have my own bathroom. You have your own bathroom. New bathroom, new Jeff. A buda dust flicks. Abuda DustFix on Twitter says, did you guys ever audition for S&L? And what do you think about Childish Gambino's? This is America Drama. And can I intern for you? So three very different questions. First one, did we audition for S&L? No, we never formally auditioned for S&L. Huge S&L fans. Yeah. We never had the opportunity

2:01.9

to audition. We may have written like a packet as, you know, writing candidates. I honestly

2:07.9

don't even know that our manager, and this is what, like eight years ago when we had comedy

2:11.6

management, I don't know that she even turned it in. No, she did not like what we were doing.

2:17.2

Yeah, who even knows?

2:18.4

I know that what we wrote was really funny, for sure. We just don't fit there now, I'm sure. Yeah. We didn't really try too hard on those fronts. We just always wanted to do our own thing. We mentioned Lauren Michaels a lot here, but we don't actually do anything about that. Right. What were with other questions? Donald Glover. My question is, how did this guy's song, like, how did people say, because I had never heard this guy's song before. Right. Which is no disrespect to the guy. Just a fact of life. Yeah. I'd never heard it. And then suddenly it was just like, oh, well, this is clearly that. There's a lot of people who think that they do sound alike. Yeah, of course. But maybe that is just friends being like, hey, I'm sticking up for my guy.

2:54.5

Yeah. this is clearly that. There's a lot of people who think that they do sound alike. Yeah, of course.

2:54.2

But maybe that is just friends being like, hey, I'm sticking up for my guy.

2:55.3

Yeah, I don't know.

2:57.2

Oh, and the third question is, can I intern for you?

2:58.6

Email us through our website.

3:00.4

Tell us what skills you have.

3:02.0

Yeah, are you nice with a bow staff?

...

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