WME’s Jordan Stone: ‘Turning Water Into Wine, Wine Into Champagne’

While the modern world preaches work-life balance, self-care and saying “no,” that doesn’t always fly in the live entertainment industry, where serving clients and being available is not just part of the job description but a lifestyle.

“In my mind  you have to accept there is no work-life balance, you have to kind of live and breathe the work you do,” says Jordan Stone, music agent at WME representing artists including Snoop Dogg, Nelly, Ciara, ian, Maddox Batson, Veeze, Lil Tjay, Pi’erre Bourne, Rich Amiri, Novulent, and more. “If you can’t accept that, I don’t know if it’s the right job for you.”

Stone, got his first hands-on experience in the music industry interning at a music management firm in his native Atlanta and Live Nation in the early 2010s before finding his way through the agency ranks, which included time at CAA, ICM Partners and APA, where he became an agent and was instrumental in growing the agency’s music roster. 

Stone, 39, was always committed to finding his way in the music business, but the road to agent can be daunting.

“When you’re an assistant, you don’t even have your own email, really,”  said Stone, who would go out of his way to meet and introduce artists to agents such like Cara Lewis, while he was working in CAA’s marketing department, and who credits hip-hop power agents Zach Iser and Caroline Yim as mentors along the way.

 “It was rewarding to get to that point and just keep pushing forward. Once I became an agent, it was really time to prove myself,” Stone said. “At APA we didn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of the larger agencies, but that’s where I built the resilience to figure out a way to make it work. So fast forward to now in a place like WME with all of its resources. I knew how to turn water into wine, and now I’m at a place where I’m turning wine into champagne.”

Pollstar: Your first look at the agency side of music was while interning at Live Nation.
Jordan Stone: I was interning there kind of before everything was digital, and they had these huge files rooms that you go into and could just look at show settlements. I would see what a Beyoncé show settlement looked like, an Eagles show settlement, just looking into it and trying to learn the inner workings of the business.

I kind of quickly realized that the agent role was kind of a mesh between the management and the A&R, because you still have to identify talent and have your finger on the pulse of what’s new and coming up. Once they become a client, you become an extension of the management team. This was towards the end of the CD era, so you started seeing the decline on the label side of things. The (agent) role was very stable, kind of in the same world as how every artist needs a lawyer, needs an accountant, every artist needs an agent. It was a skilled trade. And I loved the live aspect of it. As some of the shifts in music happened, I felt that was one constant variable that was very tough to disrupt. 

You Joined WME in 2023.
My roster coming in was more in the young hip-hop space, where I had to get them and develop them into a bigger artist. The caliber of artists I was working with, I just needed deal-flow. WME allowed me to diversify my roster. Previously if someone asked what was the biggest pop star we had, I was kind of stuck.

At WME I was able to find bigger artists. Like when I approached Nelly, his manager was one of the managers I interned with in college, and being part of this company and with the resources I was able to bring in made for a much easier conversation. Now he’s one of my biggest clients, and for this year we’re doing globally close to 60 days across the world.

You also oversee your own clients internationally, which is somewhat uncommon. 
I’m very hands-on with everything from a global aspect. That’s important because I think you have to view everything from a global standpoint. When i was APA, we didn’t have an international department, so that was nontraditional for an agent, but I represented everybody worldwide. I was doing the Europe tour and Australia and was involved in everything. Now, we actually have an office in Australia. 

A lot of ‘90s R&B and hip-hop seem to be finding big success on the road. Would you call that a specific genre?
It’s all referred to as nostalgia now. There’s definitely kind of a resurgence right now. I think music nowadays, some of it feels like it goes into a microwave,  and it comes out so quick and there’s not as much thought put into it. People are making beats and just jumping in a booth and they call it a song. The people of our time who were growing up, they had a band in the studio, there was so much more thought to it. And there’s more of a performance and theatrical aspect and people kind of miss that. 

You have signed and represent some hot new talent, though.
IAN is one I’m really excited about, who I work with with my partner Stephen Schulcz. He’s exploded out of the gate. I haven’t had anyone who’s excelled this quickly before. The first tour we did with him was only four cities, we did L.A., London, New York and Toronto. As soon as we put them up one at a time, two weeks before the show, they all sold out, some in the first minute. He’s a unique client for me because one, it lives in the rap space, but he’s also a classically trained pianist. There’s so much runway ahead of him, and he’s so focused on it himself that it makes you as an agent want to work that much harder.

Some might be surprised you also represent a teenage country phenom.
Maddox Batson. People are calling him the country Justin Bieber. He’s got a tour coming up, called “Road To Stageoach.” He’s only got four songs out, he’s 15 years old and selling out this tour. Some of the grosses are north of $80,000. That’s a real fun one to work on, just because with the target audience, a lot of the tickets are the parents, so there isn’t the price resistance that you might get for a kid’s show because the kids are so young that it’s their parents swiping their credit cards. So we’ve been able to flex some of the ticket prices up. Everything’s sold out from about 700 to 2,000-cap. And then he’s supporting Lainey Wilson on the second half of the year on her tour.  The plan is to probably put up another tour for him after Stagecoach that we’re working on right now.

Can you sum up an overall touring landscape for 2025, as many have feared over-saturation could lead to softer demand? 
It’s becoming more black and white, and there’s less of a gray area. Before, if you were kind of middle of the road, you could still survive and the shows would do well. But i think right now you’re either hot or you’re not. The hot stuff is working, and if it’s not, you don’t have the casual concert-goer so much, the fan that just kind of wanted to go out to shows. You’ve got the people who have the super fans who are gonna buy tickets, but now you have some you’re putting up that might need a little bit more elbow grease. 

How do you combat that?
One thing I try to  instill in all my clients is when you do something, let’s do it with purpose. Let’s have a reason. You can’t be out here looking at it as a bank. If you look at your bank account and it’s not where you wanted it to be and that’s your reason to go on tour, that’s the worst place you can be. 

How do promoters play in to the equation (besides the obvious)?
I’m looking for a promoter, meaning somebody who’s going to purchase a show and also market it properly. Some of the promotions part has failed a little bit because in the digital area, people feel like if they just put a couple ads up, they did their job. But I’m looking for the promoter that’s going to go above and beyond and really push the show. I think too many talent buyers kind of just get the offer out and then if the show doesn’t sell right away, they think they’re in trouble. I want someone actually putting together video content to promote the show, someone thinking outside of just a normal template of, “Let me just plug this in and press it and go on the next.” Not everything’s going to sell out immediately. You’ll get some of that, but you also have some shows where you need to know how to put a little gas on the fire to ‘em where they matter.

WME signed Snoop Dogg in all areas in 2023. What’s it been like working with someone who’s done it all?
Snoop is the ultimate multifaceted client. I told him when I was with him last year at one of his shows, that he may be the biggest rapper in the world, and biggest Black artist in the world. Anywhere you go in the world, everybody knows who Snoop Dogg is.

He’s definitely having a moment, especially after the Olympics, he is doing so much, and so many things outside of touring. We’re in the midst of planning what the next two years look like for him, being meaningful and purposeful with everything. He’s working on a biopic right now, so I think that’s one of the big priorities for him. But it’s about continuing to elevate somebody who’s already involved in everything. It’s almost the situation where, what do you give the guy that has everything?