Executive Editor, Music
How Did Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter Become Friends?
When you look at the 2024 charts, the term “boys club” comes to mind, with all those Zachs, Bensons, Teddys, Shaboozeys, Postys and Morgans.
But this past summer, it was a different story at Universal Music Publishing, whose female writers and artists carried the season: Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso" and "Please, Please Please," Billie Eilish's "Birds of a Feather" and "Lunch," Taylor Swift's "Fortnight" and "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart," SZA's "Saturn," Ariana Grande's "We Can't Be Friends" and "That Boy Is Mine," Ice Spice's "Phat Butt," Lorde's feature on Charli XCX's "Girl, So Confusing" remix, Megan Thee Stallion's "Mamushi," and critical favorites like Clairo, Gracie Abrams and even the most female adjacent writer-producer in the game, Jack Antonoff. Along with hits from Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, Feid and the writers of Post Malone's "I Had Some Help," Shaboozey's "A Bar Song" and Hozier's "Too Sweet," it helped UMPG top the second quarter of 2024 chart in Billboard's Publisher's Quarterly.
“I think we’ve had a female-driven summer, there’s a lot going on societally,” said UMPG executive VP and co-head of US A&R Jennifer Knoepfle (pronounced “K’nopefull,” rhyming with “hopeful”), who joined the company in 2022 after working with Gerson for about 13 years at Sony, bringing Antonoff with her. “Nobody really knows what’s going on [in society and the world], but there’s also this beautiful freedom in business right now that allows people to just be who they want to be, and that empowerment is spreading. I think that might be a reason why we’re seeing so many female artists exploding at the same time. It’s like the door is open for new ideas, new artists, new stars — who’s going to do it? [The artists above] are all powerful, but in different ways. Like Billie on her third album, she’s discovering and exploring who she is, and she’s publicly expressing that. People are really interested in that and invested in that.”
