In the early 2010s, Atlanta-area radio stations developed a peculiar problem: It seemed like every day, the same middle schooler, Sean Lewow, was somehow winning all of their ticket giveaways. “I had a system for doing it. It was quite literally something I’d do every single day,” Lewow, 27, says now with a grin. “Finally one day I got a call where they were like, ‘Sean, we know it’s you. Stop calling. We’ll give you the tickets, just please, for the love of God, stop pretending to be your grandmother on the phone.’”
Lewow’s determination to get closer to music has driven practically his entire life. At college, he worked his way up the ranks at the student radio station and concert committee, and he became known on campus as the kid building a creative studio and management company, Ourros, from the bunk bed in his bedroom.
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But it wasn’t until he met Max Motley, 28, that he figured out exactly what music company he wanted to build long-term — and who he wanted to do it with. Motley was born and raised in the Bay Area, and was similarly obsessed with all things music. A former general manager of his college radio station and intern at Paradigm (which is now part of THE·TEAM), Motley had the misfortune of graduating from college at the height of the pandemic in 2020 and looking for a job in live music. “I had to move back in with my parents, we were completely sheltered in place, and I’m applying to all these jobs post-grad,” he says. “I applied to like 50 to 100 different jobs, just trying to get a first-round interview anywhere. Nothing worked.”
In his desperation to break through, Motley turned to TikTok with the goal of showcasing his talent scouting chops by making content about his favorite artists. His page, @mostleymusic, was one of the earliest of its kind, taking the blog model and applying it to short-form. It quickly ballooned to more than 200,000 followers and led to A&R consultancies at multiple major labels.
Eventually, both Lewow and Motley, each in their own fashion, found their way into scouting for Darkroom CEO/founder Justin Lubliner and Interscope Records CEO/chairman John Janick. “That’s where I met Sean,” Motley explains. Still under the impression that A&R was a zero-sum game, Motley laughs that “at the time I still had this mentality of, like, everyone’s the competition, and I’ve got to take everyone down.” Lewow replies cheerfully: “The whole time I’m just like, ‘I think I made a new friend!’”
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Fast forward to February 2022, and Motley and Lewow — now assuredly friends — joined forces to start Music Soup, a joint venture with Interscope and Darkroom.
The roster started basically by accident with country artist Vincent Mason and pop singer Katherine Li, and was built on the premise of taking bets on artists that may have otherwise gotten lost in a massive major-label structure. “We realized, ‘Okay, there are these people that are super talented; they’re coming to us for help. It’s not the type of thing right now in their stage of development where it makes sense for just a major label to do. So, you know what, maybe there’s no time like the present — maybe now is the time to satisfy the dream of starting a record label of our own,’” says Lewow.
Now, a few years later and with an expanded roster, Janick says of Music Soup: “The success they’ve achieved in just a few years with artists like Vincent Mason, Waylon Wyatt, Wisp, and hey, nothing, is a reflection of their great creative instincts, their work ethic, and the trust [Motley and Lewow] earned from both artists and partners.”
BACKGROUND
Music Soup started by signing pop artist Li and country act Mason in 2022, creating the foundation for the company’s roster. Now, four years in, it boasts six employees, including Motley and Lewow, and is headquartered in Los Angeles. According to Motley, the name Music Soup was born out of a desire to pick a name that “felt approachable and warm and inviting.” Lewow adds: “Plus, Max was in a phase where anytime I would go over to his apartment to work on Music Soup, he was exclusively eating soup, to the point where I was like, this has to be a practical joke. There’s no way you can be eating soup five days a week.”
The name is also “a bit of an homage to what John Janick did with [his first label] Fueled by Ramen,” says Lewow.
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When asked about how Music Soup works with Darkroom and Interscope, Motley explains that Darkroom’s Lubliner is “like a third partner. He is involved in everything we do and gives great mentorship. His team helps us on PR, international, anything we need.” On the Interscope side, Lewow explains that it often acts as a distributor. And with anything they need, “we’re able to lean on the Interscope team,” he adds. To sum it up, says Lewow: “While [all three companies] are not listed on every artist, everybody is involved to different extents in all the artists we work on.”
Lubliner says of Motley and Lewow: “Watching them grow into the executives they’ve become — and getting to be part of that journey as a partner in Music Soup — has been a privilege. They’re just great, genuine people who lead with humility, hunger and integrity.”
THE ARTISTS
Today, the Music Soup roster is an eclectic mix of talent, including Wisp, Mason, Li, Wyatt and hey, nothing. Lewow and Motley say they are not guided by genre, or even pure metrics, just potential. “When you do it this way, you can’t rest on your laurels,” says Motley. “You can’t just be like, ‘We’re only doing country, and we have already made a roadmap of what’s going to work for every country artist.’” Lewow adds: “It forces us to make sure we are always creating new strategies and that every artist’s rollout is bespoke.”
Wisp, for example, is a shoegaze/alt-rock artist who has featured on a song with American Football, opened for System of a Down and Deftones in stadiums, and charted at No. 10 on the Billboard Hard Rock Songs chart with her song “Your face.”
Country act Vincent Mason has an RIAA platinum-certified track, “Hell Is a Dance Floor,” and notched two songs (“Something to Lose,” a collaboration with fast-rising singer-songwriter Stella Lefty, and “Damned If I Do”) on the Billboard Hot 100 in the last year.
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“We had no idea that country was going to become what country did when we signed Vincent in 2022,” says Lewow. “We just knew that he was an incredible singer-songwriter, and that we were incredibly attached to the stories that he was telling. The same thing goes for Waylon Wyatt — we loved country, folk and Americana. So it just made sense. Same thing went for Wisp.”
WHAT’S NEXT
Speaking just days before Wyatt takes the stage at the Grand Ole Opry for the first time and Mason impacts country radio with “Damned If I Do,” Lewow and Motley say they “want to take Music Soup to the moon,” as Motley puts it.
“We’ve been in the trenches with Vincent every single release since release one,” says Lewow. “We’re so excited that ‘Damned If I Do’ is going to radio. It’s a turning point for us, but we want so much more, and Vincent wants so much more. We want to continue growing Music Soup and our artists to be as big as they can possibly be.”
“But it’s never like, ‘Alright, we’re going to sign 10 artists at once and go for volume,’” adds Motley. “We’re always wanting to make sure that we have more people on our team than artists we’re working with, so that they always feel like they can pick up the phone and call Sean, myself, anyone from our team at any time,” he says.
If they had to pick a few concrete goals, though, landing a musical act on Saturday Night Live would be a dream, as would having a performer at the Grammys. “There are so many big picture milestones we still want to hit,” says Motley. “We haven’t remotely scratched the surface of what we’ll do in the next five-to-ten years.”
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