In 2013, after more than two decades as a major label promotions executive, Lionel Ridenour struck out on his own with an idea and a plan. “I saw a need in the urban space that I had seen other people doing in the pop and rhythm spaces for years, and that is offering label service promotion,” Ridenour tells Billboard about why he started his own radio promo company, Anchor Promotions. “Not being an independent promoter, as it were, but actually offering staffed services to major labels or independent artists or independent labels. That was the impetus for it.”
Nearly a decade later, Ridenour has grown Anchor into one of the premier independent radio promo companies around, helping independent artists and labels, as well as partnering with major-label promo departments, to help break hip-hop and R&B records on the radio. After first working with Webbie and Trill Entertainment and Rich Homie Quan and YFN Lucci with Think It’s A Game Records early on, Anchor went on to work records for Lil Dicky, Chance The Rapper, Lil Pump and Daniel Caesar, partner with Warner Records, Hitco, Geffen and Alamo, and help land top five radio singles for CJ (“Whoopty,” No. 1 on Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay), Yung Bleu (“You’re Mines Still” with Drake, No. 1 on Rhythmic Airplay and Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay), Blxst (“Chosen” feat. Tyga & Ty Dolla $ign, No. 1 on Rap Airplay and Rhythmic Airplay) and Rod Wave (“Rags2Riches” feat. ATR Son Son, No. 2 on Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay; “Tombstone,” No. 3 on Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay), among others, in the past year. Currently, Anchor is helping work Muni Long’s breakout indie hit “Hrs And Hrs,” which sits at No. 5 on R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay as it climbed to No. 1 on Hot R&B Songs and No. 19 on the Hot 100, and has put the songwriter in the midst of an industry bidding war.
It’s an impressive lineup for Anchor and Ridenour, who has focused his company on being the final piece of the puzzle for those who have been succeeding in other facets of the business, but needed radio to push things to another level. “You had people in the management community, people at small labels, independent artists themselves where they pretty much had all the other pieces — speaking specifically to the urban side — and were set up for success, but this was the piece that was missing,” he says. “That one missing piece for a lot of people was, ‘How do I go about working and getting myself promoted at radio?’”
Ridenour’s track record over the past 30-plus years in the music business helped pave the way for Anchor’s successes. In the late 1980s, he helped pioneer street-level promotions and grassroots marketing in the burgeoning hip-hop and R&B space, before moving into the major label system after Capitol brought his company in-house. In 1993 he joined Arista, then home to Whitney Houston, and over the next decade led radio campaigns for some of Arista’s partner labels like L.A. Reid’s LaFace, home to OutKast, Toni Braxton and Usher; and Diddy’s Bad Boy, working records by The Notorious B.I.G., Craig Mack, Faith Evans and 112, among others; before moving to Virgin and Malaco Records, making connections and maintaining relationships along the way.
When the major-label game of musical chairs started up again in 2013, with turnover high amid industry-wide changes, “there wasn’t a chair for me,” Ridenour says. “So what do I do? Do I just fold the tent or do I take my skill set and use it in a different way?”
That led to the formation of Anchor, which Ridenour built slowly and steadily by leveraging relationships into opportunities and re-establishing his credentials, with Anchor finding a way to distinguish itself through individual attention to each record rather than amassing volume. “It’s a lot of concepts that any promotional staff would use at a major label, it’s just implementing it on a one-by-one-by-one situations as it pertains to a particular artist,” he says. “At a label, you’ve gotta work five artists that are given to you; we work maybe five different projects that aren’t necessarily cross-pollinated or under the same roof, but we provide them with the same service.”
Anchor’s work on the Muni Long record came through his relationships, particularly JR McKee of MPR Global Distribution. In collaboration with McKee and Long’s team at her Supergiant Records label — including co-founder/co-manager Rashad Tyler and co-manager Chris Anokute — Anchor began working the record at R&B formats, only for the team to realize it was taking off so fast that they needed to broaden their scope; this week, “Hrs And Hrs” debuted at No. 49 on Billboard’s all-format Radio Songs chart.
“Flexibility, not being so rigid, understanding what the customer wants — I think that’s a big part of [our success],” says Ridenour, who adds he’s looking to expand Anchor’s offerings into digital-service provider promotions in the coming months. “You know, success for some people might be getting a record charting; for someone else it may be getting a record to a point where a light has shown on it and maybe a major comes in and picks it up. For others it might be about laying the foundation, building an artist and taking them all the way through the first or second or even the third record. But they understand that there is someone that they can turn to and that they’ll understand the results that they’re going to get.”
Spotlight:
The best advice I received is: Two things. One, from Clive Davis: “At the end of the day, it’s all about the song.” The second thing, from Clarence Avant: “It’s all about numbers.”
I would tell people coming up in this industry: Follow the youth. The kids are always gonna be right.
Something most people don’t understand about what I do is: That the majority of the work is really about educating. Radio programmers are bombarded with multiple records by multiple labels and all the rest of that. What can you do to educate them? I think that’s what it boils down to — it’s an education process. You’ve gotta be able to convey the vision of what that artist or label has and get the buy-in from radio.
What’s changed in my line of work is: It used to be that everything was from the gut, like choosing the single — and some people will still do things from a gut standpoint — but the overwhelming majority are going to do things based off a particular sales pattern or some kind of a social media moment going on. Those things are more of the lead, as it were. And then we have to move and adjust to that.
In my job, it’s good to have: Patience. It is very good to have patience.
soul, classic soul, motown,
