Mariah Carey has officially dropped Roc Nation and signed with Range Media Partners, which launched about nine months back. However, the 52-year-old singer-songwriter has insisted that there was no falling out between her and Jay-Z, who founded Roc Nation in 2008.
The Sun just recently indicated that Mariah Carey was set to depart Roc Nation after about 42 months, while outlets including Deadline specified that the Huntington, New York, native had proceeded to enlist Range Media Partners to handle her representation.
Furthermore, The Sun relayed in its report that the five-time Grammy winner Carey and the 23-time Grammy winner Jay-Z had gone their separate ways following “an explosive meeting” about the future of Carey’s career.
On the latter front, the Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee Carey is set to release a track entitled “Somewhat Loved” with Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis on Friday, and some of her recent tweets have promoted a paperback edition of her memoir (scheduled to become available to fans in November), an extended merch line, and even her Mariah’s Cookies.
At the time of this piece’s publishing, neither Roc Nation (which has removed Carey from its list of represented acts) nor Jay-Z had publicly addressed the purported argument with the “All I Want For Christmas Is You” singer and songwriter. But Carey – who in December released Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special on AppleTV+ – pushed back against the rumor on social media.
“The only ‘explosive’ situation I’d ever ‘get into’ with Hov is a creative tangent, such as our #1 song ‘Heartbreaker’!! To the people who make up these lies I say ‘Poof! —Vamoose, sonofa*****’!” wrote Carey, including a 42-second-long clip of the music video from her and Jay-Z’s “Heartbreaker” (1999).
The less than year-old Range Media Partners – which caters predominantly to prominent media figures and, to be sure, displays only a logo and an email address on its single-page website – hasn’t yet commented publicly on the reported signing of Mariah Carey. Moreover, the precise reason(s) for Carey’s move remains unclear, but the development appears to be the latest in a long line of noteworthy shakeups in the representation sphere.
Range Media Partners itself was founded by a collection of former CAA, WME, and UTA agents (with financial support from Point72 Asset Management, the hedge fund of New York Mets owner Steve Cohen), and five former Paradigm agents in September of 2020 launched TBA.
More recently, UTA in March acquired London’s Echo Location, and Wasserman in late April officially closed its purchase of Paradigm’s troubled music touring division and rebranded the acquired assets as “Wasserman Music.” On the artist side, Lil Wayne has signed with UTA, and The Weeknd has jumped from WME to CAA.