What do Afrojack, Meghan Trainor and the members of Florida Georgia Line have in common? On the surface, not much: the first is a Dutch DJ, the second is a budding pop star from Massachusetts, the last is a country-rock duo that dabbles in hip-hop.
Superficial differences aside, there’s at least one trait that all three acts share: they’ve known since their teenage years that they wanted to be professional musicians.
“At 13 I told my parents I needed a tour bus because I was going to be famous,” recalls Trainor. Afrojack says the moment came the first time he saw a DJ spinning at a nightclub when he was 15: “That’s basically when I said, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
“If this music thing didn't work out, [we’d] probably still be in Nashville trying to figure out how to write songs,” says Florida Georgia Line’s Brian Kelley. “That was plan A, B, C, D, E, F, G.”
These three acts have made it in an industry long on dreams and short on opportunity—which is why they’re a part of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2015 in the music category.
Full coverage: 30 Under 30 In Music
In order to form the list, we brought on three industry veterans to serve as judges: Taylor Hanson, of the band Hanson; Jody Gerson, chief of Universal Music Publishing; and Troy Carter, founder of Atom Factory and manager of acts including John Legend and John Mayer.
There’s a new rule this year—no repeats, which means you won’t be seeing the likes of Bruno Mars, Taylor Swift, Wiz Khalifa or Mac Miller on the list. But many members of the next generation of music stars can be found on the list, including Ed Sheeran, Kacey Musgraves, Big Sean and Sam Smith.
The latter has had one of the best years of any musician of any age, earning six Grammy nominations, including Song of the Year and Album of the Year. No other artist garnered more, part of the reason Smith was a darling of our judges.
“He has made a bold entrance with a commercially and critically loved album,” says Hanson. “He is a writer and performer.”
To even the playing field, we kept our rule mandating that at least ten members of the list must not be performers. That’s part of the reason a handful of producers and entrepreneurs made the list.
These names range from Swedish producer Shellback, who had a hand in nine songs on Taylor Swift’s latest album, to Cantora Records cofounder Will Griggs, who counts Bear Hands’ latest release among his proudest accomplishments.
“We've worked with them from the beginning,” says Griggs, whose label also helped launch MGMT years ago. “It was a thrill to see them reach a much wider audience in 2014.”
It's fair to say the same about all the names on this year's 30 Under 30 list.
The 30 Under 30 Music list is edited by Zack O'Malley Greenburg and Natalie Robehmed.
For more about the business of music, check out my Jay Z biography Empire State of Mind and my new book Michael Jackson, Inc. You can follow me on Twitter & Facebook.
