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Founder, engineer, and pioneer Ghazi Shami takes us on a journey from his youth in San Francisco falling in love with the buzzing Bay Area music scene, to taking a tech job in Silicon Valley, to combining those two worlds together to create his wildly successful music company, EMPIRE.
In this episode hear how Ghazi started out as an engineer and opened his own recording studio at the age of 18, found a job in technology and brought new ideas to the music industry, and then put it all together to distribute the debut album of a then relatively unknown artist by the name of Kendrick Lamar.
Act I
0:00 – Intro
1:20 – Childhood, father’s work ethic, parents running a laundromat
4:10 – First experiences working on music
6:01 – Going to San Francisco State to study audio engineering
8:00 – Buying his first studio, working with The Game, leaving Silicon Valley
Act II
11:05 – Working with Ingrooves, merging technology and culture
12:45 – Starting EMPIRE, early days
14:00 – When to work with an artist, making an artist comfortable
15:50 – First EMPIRE releases, working with TDE and Kendrick Lamar
17:10 – Growing EMPIRE brick by brick
20:40 – Adding label services to EMPIRE
Act III
22:08 – Cultivating great artist relationships, building for long term success
25:00 – Touring the EMPIRE office
26:35 – Making the website easy, going international
30:20 – Not taking on investments, remaining the sole proprietor
32:00 – The future and beyond
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Credits
Noah Callahan-Bever
Creator & Host, Idea Generation
Starring: Ghazi
Musical Director: A-Trak
Animations by: Sang Bleu / IDEA GENERATION
Executive Producers: Helena Ox, Tricia Clarke-Stone and John Walaszek
Producer: Adam Fleischer
Creative Director + Editor: Kyle Gaughan
Produced by: Only Ch1ld
DP: Jeremy Mcnamara
Producers: Matthew Justus, Spencer Kehe, Sam Miller
Line Producer: Sabrina Mota
Cam Op: Logan Parsley
Sound: Adriano Bravo
MUA: Carla Grace Fajardo
PA: Marcus Gomez
Security: Timothy Overall
Special thanks to:
Peter Kadin
Samyah Ahmed
Shot on:
Canon
Special thanks to our partners at Shopify for bringing this experience to life.
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