Meet ‘Zach and Tony,’ the Lifelong Friends Behind Elliot Grainge’s Atlantic Reinvention
Atlantic Music Group executives Zach Friedman, 34, and Tony Talamo, 35, have always been seen as a package deal. Often referred to in tandem as simply “Zach and Tony,” the trusted right-hand men of AMG CEO and longtime colleague Elliot Grainge say their friendship predates their label roles by decades.
“We’ve known each other since birth,” Talamo says. “Same neighborhood, same everything. Growing up, we bonded over movies, music and sports.” Like many entrepreneurs before them, the Voorhees, N.J.-raised duo started a marketing and management company — eventually called Homemade Projects — in 2011 during their first year of college. “It was the moment when music really started to become democratized,” Friedman says. “Justin Bieber used YouTube to build a fan base. We were big fans of Mac Miller, and we saw him succeeding with just his friends and a camera.”
Talamo and Friedman identified a promising young act of their own, a tween rapper named Chris Miles. They DM’d him, offering to help make a music video. It didn’t matter that Talamo and Friedman were only 19 or that they didn’t have any experience making videos. They wanted to help Miles build a fan base online. “We took a bus into the city and started making his videos,” Friedman says. Soon after, they got Miles onto WorldStarHipHop, a popular rap blog at the time, which earned the young artist millions of views a day, Friedman recalls.
Homemade Projects grew into one of the early leading digital marketing companies, contracting for major labels on retainer and blowing up artists on now-defunct social apps like Musical.ly (which eventually merged into TikTok) and Vine.
“Now everyone does this. It feels like every day there’s a new one of these companies,” Friedman says. “But at the time no one really understood what we were doing or the full power of these influencers.”
Along the way, Talamo and Friedman met Grainge, a similarly young entrepreneur who was building his own independent label, 10K Projects. “Elliot really got what we were doing from the beginning,” Talamo says. “We became great friends.” Business followed. The duo started handling digital marketing for 10K, then formed a joint venture with Grainge and eventually became the label’s co-presidents.
When Grainge sold a majority stake in 10K to Warner Music Group and was appointed CEO of AMG a year later in October 2024 — which included oversight of 10K, 300 Entertainment and Elektra — he installed Friedman and Talamo as COO and GM, respectively, and adopted the digital-first strategy that Homemade Projects had pioneered.
“It’s just like when we were 16 in the basement,” Friedman says. “And when it doesn’t feel that way anymore, I’m out.”
Early in your careers, you signed one of your artists to Atlantic Records. What was the label like when you first worked with them?
Zach Friedman: Tony and I were in a meeting. It was supposed to be a planning meeting, and we were like, “We really need to get on Spotify playlists.” I’m not going to name names, but someone at Atlantic said, “Name one rapper that’s broken off Spotify.”
Tony Talamo: We looked at each other, like, “Oh, we’re screwed.” That’s when we realized we were going to have to figure this out on our own. That’s when we stumbled across MagCon [the Meet and Greet Convention where fans mingled with Instagram and Vine stars; it ran from 2013 to 2017].
Friedman: That’s where we really saw the power of influencers. Five thousand people would show up to these shows to meet people. It was just a meet-and-greet — literally nothing else. All these girls would show up, and we would see that when the influencers posted songs, they would rise up the iTunes chart. We made a deck, went to every major label and pitched paying these [young influencers] we knew to create hit songs. We were always hustling, and everyone was like, “We’ll give you $1,000, $1,500.” It would always work.
Digital marketing changes at a high velocity. What is the key to staying on top of it?
Friedman: We’re chronically online. We’re fans first. This was our hobby before it was our job. That’s the competitive advantage. Also, we pioneered the space before anyone else was in it or taking it seriously.
Talamo: To Zach’s point, when you do something for so long and you’re so in it, you can read the tea leaves and you know how to maneuver.
When did you see other people catch on to influencer marketing?
Friedman: There were only a few people doing it when Musical.ly transferred to TikTok and COVID happened. There was no other play because everyone was inside, so that’s when it exploded.
What did you do in your first days at Atlantic Music Group?
Talamo: First was the roster. We had to go through and see what we felt we could immediately sprinkle our magic dust on, so to speak. Second was the team. We met everybody and talked to them at length. Then we had to decide how we wanted to structure everything — from a marketing standpoint, from an A&R standpoint. What resources were in one department that we felt should be in another. Really getting under the hood and seeing how we could make it more efficient and more effective in the current music climate.
Friedman: When we met with the staff, a lot of people felt defeated over the past three years, and we just wanted people to have fun again. People here are excited again, and they’re having a good time. I feel like there’s a lot of negativity in music right now. But the vibe at Atlantic isn’t like that.
Now that the music business has become so democratized, what is the value of a major label?
Friedman: We’ve been on the other side of the table. We have the insight of going to all the labels and hearing all the pitches, and we worked in digital for a bunch of the labels. I think we are the best at the internet and providing strategies to maximize people’s fan bases and communities. It’s really powerful that we run the global campaigns out of our office here.
How much of Atlantic under Elliot Grainge is basically a bigger, revamped version of what he built with 10K?
Friedman: The entrepreneurial spirit and the indie spirit definitely flow through Atlantic now. We don’t say no a lot here. People are given the reins to build things and be their own boss, which is really powerful, especially for young people to learn and succeed.
Major labels are largely undergoing a lot of change, including restructuring, layoffs and new CEOs. Why is this happening all at once?
Friedman: Restructures are terrible, but sometimes they’re needed to bring fresh life. There’s a new way of doing things, and there were a lot of redundancies in the system. They had to be cleared out to provide to other resources.
Now that AMG has gone through layoffs and restructuring, where do you want to invest those savings?
Friedman: A&R and overall digital audience building.
Talamo: Content, for sure. We’re in a battle for attention. You’re not just competing with the million songs uploaded a day or whatever that stat is — you’re competing with business and news and food and influencers and sports — all these different things. And everyone has an opinion.
Can artists compete without doing the kind of digital marketing you are doing?
Friedman: Yes, 100%. Quality always wins. If the art is that good, people will share it. There are so many artists that come here that are doing millions of streams a week and have spent zero dollars on marketing.
Talamo: It’s not all about money.
Friedman: The fans are creating trends themselves now. Could they amplify that and put their music in front of a bigger audience? Yes. That’s our job, once they bring us in.
Lastly, any update on when we can expect WMG’s long awaited superfan app?
Friedman: I don’t have an update on that.
(Disclosure: this writer worked at 10K Projects from 2020 to 2021.)
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