She’s (Finally) the Boss: Women Are Rising to the Top of Major-Label A&R Departments
variety.comJem Aswad Senior Music EditorRani Hancock, the recently appointed executive vice president and head of Columbia Records’ A&R department, took a bold and uncommon course into the music industry — uncommon for a woman, anyway.
She studied to become a recording engineer at the prestigious Berklee College of Music.“I’d started out trying to be a musician but realized quickly that I was terrible at it,” she says. “So in my rudimentary knowledge of the music business, I thought supporting artists meant working in a studio.
But when I graduated from Berklee, I tried to get a job in a studio and was literally told, ‘Well, you seem qualified — but you’re a girl.’”Wendy Goldstein, one of the top A&R execs of the past 30 years and recently appointed co-president of Republic Records, got a similar reaction when she was starting out. “I was constantly told, ‘Women can’t be A&R people — what’s wrong with you?’” she says.
A tone of matter-of-fact acceptance while recalling such blood-boilingly infuriating remarks speaks to how deeply entrenched these attitudes have been historically within the departments that are the very foundation of the recording industry.
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