Franz De Los Reyes

Helio-Tropes

Franz De Los Reyes is a music executive and Senior Vice President of Marketing at SALXCO (The Weeknd, Nav, Metro Boomin and more) who has previously held positions at three major labels including Def Jam, Epic and Warner Records. He shares how he broke into the music industry by being the squeeky wheel and building lasting relationships along with some digital savvy that major labels were farming in the blog era. He stayed down to come up and now lives in Los Angeles attempting to perfect his golf swing at the range at the Wilson Harding Golf Club in Griffith Park where I coincidentally ran into him this morning as he was taking his golf lesson before mine —straight out of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. We talk shop about the marketing campaign for Metro and Future's 'We Don't Trust You Album' (which he worked on) and how the ripple effect of the #1 single "Like That" led to a beef between two raging, aging rappers that we pray is over by now. We dissect how a good rap diss track functions differently than a great song, and how the latter may not matter if one of them becomes a hit i.e. Kendrick's "Not Like Us." We talk about comedian King Willionius' AI song "BBL Drizzy," the original sample source for Metro Boomin's viral diss-beat with the same title, and corporate America's cringey effort to get in on the action. All of the above and more on this one.