On March 25, Larry Jackson invited executives from Spotify Technology SA and Apple Music to the Southern California home of Ye, the musical artist formerly known as Kanye West. Ye was finishing work on a new album, “Bully,” which Jackson wanted to play for a handful of industry tastemakers.
Major streaming services had been wary of being in business with Ye since he released a song called “Heil Hitler” in May 2025, the culmination of years of offensive public outbursts. Jackson hoped that this intimate listening session with top editors from streaming services would convince them to support “Bully.”
As the executives sat in Ye’s Beverly Hills mansion, their resistance softened. The 18 tracks sounded like a normal album, not an antisemitic screed. They weren’t going to promote “Bully” like they might a new record from Drake or BTS, but they were open to doing business.
Apple Music put Ye on the cover of Rap Life, its flagship hip-hop playlist. Spotify featured the song Father on Today’s Top Hits, a playlist with more than 35 million followers.
The push from streaming services and radio stations boosted Ye to his strongest week of sales in five years. Bully debuted at No. 2 on the charts, selling the equivalent of 152,000 units. The following week, Ye sold out two shows in Los Angeles, grossing more than $33 million. He sold 10,000 vinyl records in a matter of hours at the second concert.
Ebro Darden, Apple Music’s global editorial head of hip-hop and R&B, was at the listening party at Ye’s house in March.
“I went because one of the biggest rappers of all time is putting out a record,” he said. “We didn’t have a discussion about his transgressions but we had a discussion about the music and I like the music.”
The rollout of Bully has still been bumpy. Days after his packed shows in Los Angeles, Ye was banned from performing in the UK. He has postponed a show in Marseille after the government contemplated prohibiting him there as well. He remains unwelcome in Australia.
Yet the commercial and critical reception to the album has exceeded expectations. That’s in large part thanks to a weeks-long campaign by Jackson and his company Gamma, which spent more than $2 million to market the album on billboards in more than a dozen cities around the world.
“I couldn’t believe it, nor could [Ye],” Jackson said in a recent interview. The support from streaming services and fans has been “wildly beyond my expectations.” Gamma’s share of US music streams climbed north of 4% in the week of Ye’s release, eclipsing several other more established labels.
Jackson is undeterred by the cold-shouldering in some corners and eager to build on Ye’s foundation as the most influential recording artist of the century. He believes that efforts to ban Ye will backfire, much like past attempts to silence gangster rap. He is pushing ahead with plans for more shows – and more apologies – eager to prove that a warm reception from millions of fans can help Ye shed his status as a pariah.
After starting his career as the music director at San Francisco radio station KMEL, Jackson learned artist relations from two of the best record executives in the history of the music business, Clive Davis and Jimmy Iovine. He saw Davis turn Alicia Keys into a global superstar and Iovine do the same with Eminem and Lady Gaga.
Later, Jackson would help introduce the world to Leona Lewis and Lana Del Rey. He was working at Interscope Records when Iovine started a headphone company as a side project. Jackson followed Iovine to Apple after it acquired his Beats Electronics for $3 billion and later served as one of the leaders of Apple’s music service.
When Jackson left Apple to start Gamma in 2023, he positioned the company as a new alternative for a growing number of high-profile musicians who are eager to leave the major label system. He has shown a particular knack for working with idiosyncratic artists. “I’m attracted to art that is divisive and polarizing,” he said, joking that, much like his artists, he can be difficult. “In this world where we are assaulted by a cacophony of content on a daily basis, something has to really cut through.”
Jackson signed Mariah Carey, releasing a new album and booking her as the headline performer at the opening ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics. Gamma partnered with Snoop Dogg on the catalog of Death Row Records and is now working with him on Snoop GPT – a virtual assistant that can handle your tasks in the voice of the Gin and Juice rapper.
Later this year, Gamma will release new albums from rappers Rick Ross and Sexyy Red, support a new tour from R&B singer Usher and introduce a new act — North West, who is Ye’s daughter. “You’re going to see more entrepreneurial artists” flock to Gamma, according to Todd Boehly, a billionaire financier who is one of Gamma’s investors. Boehly raved about the lineup of stars Jackson has assembled, comparing his ability to woo talent to that of the movie studio A24, another of his investments. “Larry has figured out how to provide opportunities for artists beyond traditional label revenue sources,” he said.
For all of his success over the last two decades, reviving Ye’s career would be Jackson’s biggest coup by far. Once a successful producer, artist and fashion designer, Ye has alienated most of his business partners and many of his fans over the last few years. His record label, talent agency and apparel partners all cut ties with him in 2022 when he talked about going “death con 3 on Jewish people.
Jackson was caught off guard when he received a call from Ye late last year. They had known each other for more than 15 years, dating to when the rapper, then known as Kanye West, was working with Jay-Z on the album Watch the Throne. But the two hadn’t spoken in months – not since Ye had performed at Gamma’s Grammy party in 2025 at the Living Room in Hollywood.
In the weeks following that impromptu DJ set, the rapper released Heil Hitler, sold T-shirts emblazoned with swastikas and donned a Ku Klux Klan robe in an interview, alienating his already dwindling roster of allies.
Yet as Jackson listened to Ye speak from Switzerland, he was encouraged that the 48-year-old rapper seemed aware that many people were upset with him, as well as what he’d done to offend them. He expressed remorse, regret and embarrassment. Ye also said he had found a regimen of drugs that was working to balance his bipolar disorder.
“It was a completely different person, a friend that I had never spoken to before,” Jackson recalled, sitting in the West Hollywood offices of Gamma. Jackson has three cousins who suffer from bipolar disorder. They often don’t know or remember what they say when they have an episode. At the end of their call, Jackson suggested they get together when Ye returned to Los Angeles.
The two reconnected in Los Angeles and Tokyo, trading recommendations for TV shows, films and restaurants. (Jackson recommended that Ye watch the Netflix series Adolescence.) As Jackson gave Ye a ride to a meeting in Los Angeles, Ye played an early demo of All the Love.
Jackson liked what he heard, and that trip led to a conversation about whether they could work together again. Jackson had managed Ye around the release of the 2013 album Yeezus, cementing their friendship and starting more than a decade of on-again, off-again collaborations.
Soft-spoken and loquacious, Jackson treads carefully when discussing Ye’s many controversies. But he is unflinching in his belief that the artist deserves another chance, noting that politicians all over the world have said more offensive things than the rapper, who suffers from a mental illness.
“There’s been certain times, candidly, that our friendship has been really, really strained, and I, too, have been disappointed about the things that he said publicly,” Jackson said. But “if someone apologized to me and I felt sincerity in their heart and remorse in their spirit, I’m a forgiving person.”
Jackson urged Ye to let his friends and followers know that he didn’t hate Jews and to publicly acknowledge his mental health disorder. It would be a shame if the main thing that young fans know about Ye is Heil Hitler, Jackson told him. Ye spent weeks working on a personal journal entry atoning for his actions that was published in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year as an advertisement.
“I’m not asking for sympathy or a free pass,” he wrote. “I aspire to earn your forgiveness.”
While Jackson was willing to embrace his friend, others haven’t been as forgiving. Apologizing right before releasing a new album struck many as insincere. Ye had apologized once before in the leadup to a new album and reverted to his old ways within days.
“The apology dropping in the prerelease stretch of his album launch made it look like a strategic push for image reform,” music critic Craig Jenkins wrote in Vulture.
Some music industry executives are skeptical that Ye can sustain his current restraint and assume another outburst is around the corner. Concert promoters like Live Nation Entertainment Inc. aren’t going to risk bankrolling a global tour until they are confident that he won’t break down. Ye hasn’t staged a global tour in a decade, and that one ended prematurely when he checked into the hospital.
Investing in Ye is an opportunity with more complexity but massive upside, said Boehly, who attended one of Ye’s shows in Los Angeles. Boehly spoke about the return of Ye with various business partners and they decided it was a worthwhile risk for a newer organization to take.
Shaw writes for Bloomberg.
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