S10 founder Brandon Silverstein and Avex USA head Naoki Osada. Photo Credit: Jeremy Jackson
Avex USA, the stateside label, publisher, and venture-fund division of the namesake Japanese entertainment conglomerate, has announced a strategic investment in Brandon Silverstein’s S10 Entertainment.
The Los Angeles-headquartered business just recently confirmed the investment in a formal release, after Katsumi Kuroiwa, CEO of the overarching Avex operation, first disclosed the play at an investor conference in Tokyo.
Itself consisting of label, publishing, investment, and management arms, S10 was founded in 2017 by the aforementioned Silverstein. In 2018, the entity revealed that it had joined “the Roc Nation family” via a “creative partnership,” and Avex USA emphasized this high-profile connection to the Jay-Z company when announcing the investment.
Besides that point and its existing tie-up with S10 Publishing, four-year-old Avex USA opted against identifying any of the stake’s specifics, including the ownership percentage and the hard monetary value at hand.
Nevertheless, execs did drive home the union’s perceived potential to help Avex’s Japanese acts crack the U.S. market and to aid American talent in establishing a presence in the Asian nation, which boasts today’s second-largest recorded music industry.
All told, Tokyo-based Avex is said to have north of 1,500 employees between 11 international offices, representing more than 450 total clients across music, film, TV, and fashion alike. And Avex USA, for its part, oversees labels including Blue Suede Records and has stakes in companies such as Universal Music-partnered sound-wellness app Endel.
“We’ve achieved a tremendous amount with Brandon in recent years,” weighed in Avex USA CEO Naoki Osada, “and over that time built a great trust between us. We share a lot in common with our respective companies’ DNA, and extending our partnership was a natural and organic step.
“We are very grateful that Brandon, Jay and Roc Nation have welcomed us into their family and are incredibly excited to create something truly unique and impactful through this partnership,” concluded Osada, who previously spent over a decade as an exec with Avex proper.
And in remarks of his own, Silverstein, whose company’s management clients include Bad Bunny collaborator Myke Towers, described leaning in with Avex as “a natural progression in deepening our ever-growing relationship.”
Towards 2023’s conclusion, Paris-headquartered Believe, soon to (once again) be a private company, dramatically expanded its presence in Japan with the debut of a Tokyo headquarters; that development set the stage for the February of 2024 rollout of a hip-hop imprint called Playcode. And Warner Music kicked off 2024 by unveiling an artist-focused strategic alliance with Red Light Management in Japan.
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