From the Ground Up: How Stan Wittenberg Built a Thriving Record Label

The music industry is not what it used to be. With the rise of streaming, the power has shifted from record labels to artists and fans. This shift has also impacted the record label space, an industry traditionally dominated by a few wealthy individuals. Twenty years ago, new entrants would have had no hope of succeeding in this space with no money and experience to back them up. Then, streaming services entered the scene and disrupted the status quo.

Stan Wittenberg, the founder of the Trap Music Group, got into this space when the music industry was still figuring out how streaming impacted business models. Not long ago, music labels relied on live shows and CD sales for most of their income, but that was changing as music became more ubiquitous. For Wittenberg, this was not strange because he’d grown up in this new world. At 15, he understood the shifting dynamics better than some people who had been in this industry for years. Wittenberg saw an opportunity to monetize that knowledge and launched Tribal Trap as a curational YouTube channel for trap music enthusiasts in 2014.

The platform uploaded music from third-party artists to share with Wittenberg’s audience, who came to the channel to hear new trap daily without having to go out and look for it. However, Wittenberg had a rough start when he tried to expand the business because he lacked the education or experience to navigate the industry. After several false starts, he figured out how things worked and shifted his attention to music promotion. Artists started signing to Tribal Trap for exclusive premieres and releases, eventually transforming the channel into a record label with many entities today.

Tribal Trap has grown into Tribal Music Group, an empire whose core business is record labels and releasing music. It has several brands and entities, namely Tribal Trap, Diverge Records, and Clout.nu, collectively reaching about 2M listeners daily. The company also owns a collective of Instagram accounts like Supraschool with 300k followers, supra_mk4_club with 192K, litrover with 114K, Crazycarzon with 315K, Bimmer Syndicate with 90K, and jdmschool_official with 121K. Tribal Trap also has over 600K followers on Spotify, 150K on Soundcloud, and 40K on Audiomack, to name a few. Cumulatively, the company has a network with over 7M followers.

Succeeding in this space requires innovation and flexibility, two qualities Wittenberg has possessed in abundance since the early days. “When working with artists, management teams, or other record labels that have been around for a long time, it’s hard to be taken seriously when you’ve just turned 17 but claim you can represent them, let alone claiming you can represent them better than a record label that’s been around for many years,” Wittenberg recalls. However, his persistence and hard work paid off. After making and learning from numerous mistakes, he found his tribe in his friends Trap Nation, Elysian Records, Trap Party, and people like Josh Carr-Hilton, amongst many others. They helped him run his business, and he’s maintained that network to date.

Wittenberg hopes to scale his company into a multi-media network encompassing more different digital media brands in the next few years. Currently, all brands in the company are collectively focused on promoting music in more “new age” ways like NFTs, user-generated content (reels), and other kinds of guerilla-like marketing strategies. His goal is to explore further and transform Tribal Music Group into a household name in the music industry.

Written in partnership with Amir Bakian