ABOUT

For Joseph Pepin, success can't be boiled down just to the numbers. Which isn't to say the long-time artist manager and A&R doesn't have them. He's helped musicians vault from thousands of monthly listeners into the millions in less than a year. He's seen them reach the upper echelons of the charts, both in the U.S. and abroad. Producers on his roster have been nominated for major awards and worked across GRAMMY-winning projects. By basically any metric, he knows how to shape and develop artists and songs, to help them reach the ears of the fans he knows that they deserve. But those metrics aren't what matter most to him. When he takes on a new project, what he loves most is finding the best way to serve a fully realized vision - to work with creators he loves, helping them become the best versions of themselves.

What that means on a day-to-day basis varies in ways that truly invigorate Pepin, who runs his PEPIN.WORKS firm and consultancy out of Austin, Texas, with additional staff in London. With a wide-ranging catalog of clients - from genre-blurring, post-internet pop artists like Quadeca to textured soul purveyors like GoldFord to GRAMMY-nominated rap architects like Charlie Heat - he's bouncing between sounds and styles, surveying the landscape of disparate genres from all angles. Johan Lenox, for example, not only won the top sound design honor at Cannes 2025 for his score for The Plague, but also co-wrote and co-produced the 4x Platinum, Billboard Hot 100 #3 hit "Creepin" by Metro Boomin, the Weeknd, and 21 Savage. His client Nate Donmoyer similarly cuts a distinct swath through music that includes the Weeknd and Gesaffelstein's "Lost in the Fire," which has amassed more than 2 billion global streams across platforms to date.

"I work with artists who are doing something unique," he says. "As a result, the musicians I work with couldn't be more different. Their processes couldn't be more different. The things I provide for them could not be more different." Pepin sees his job as a creative outlet in its own right - every day he's working to solve new problems for new artists, quick to take action and always hands-on in fitting the puzzle pieces together in a way that makes sense for all involved.

Pepin relies on sharp instincts that he's been honing since he was a teenager, growing up in the New Jersey punk scene. After seeing Blink-182, Primus, and the Aquabats at a festival at 12 years old, he quickly got involved in his local music community, first as a concert photographer and then as a merch seller and street team leader for tours coming through the Northeast. "Getting into music was almost a compulsion," he says. "I couldn't think of anything else." While studying at Berklee College of Music, he began managing friends' bands, one of which went onto form the touring unit for Passion Pit (Donmoyer was part of that outfit, and went on to drum, write, and produce with the indie art-pop titans). It was intensely DIY back then.

After a stint at Mercury Records with David Massey, a relationship Pepin cites as pivotal in understanding the industry, he moved to a management co-op that primarily worked with DJs and electronic artists. His clients - including Tritonal and Bingo Players, who had a UK #1 with their hit "Rattle" - held down multiple Las Vegas residencies and headlined or performed at festivals including Electric Daisy Carnival and Coachella. Meanwhile, doing A&R there sent him digging on blogs and SoundCloud, sharpening his curious ear to new sounds and scenes, and he collaborated with early-career songwriters who would go on to become hitmakers, like Emily Warren, Chloe Angelides, JHart, and Phoebe Ryan, the latter a college freshman at the time.

Since going out on his own in 2016, Pepin has woven all of these experiences into his work. The DIY grit is clear in his willingness to go to the mat for any of his clients - his conviction that if there's anything he doesn't know how to do for them right off the bat, well, he can always figure it out or lean into the robust network of experts he's cultivated over the years.

The open-minded listening continues to come into play as well, through his work as an A&R consultant, which Pepin does not only with his management roster, but for a variety of partners. One such client, the classical duo ARKAI, won the 2026 GRAMMY Award for "Best Contemporary Instrumental Album" for their project Brightside, which Pepin A&R'd.

He also works extensively with Primary Wave, a publishing company that acquires and licenses catalogs of iconic songs from music's past. Pepin embarks on deep-listening sessions through their vast trove, noting moments that might be ripe for sampling or reimagining, and then goes onto set up songwriting camps that translate these catalog works into new potential hits. To wit, Pepin was instrumental in the creation of FISHER's biggest club hit of 2025, "STAY" - so much so that he's credited as a co-writer on the record, which reworks Exile's 1978 soft-rock hit "Kiss You All Over," written by Primary Wave songwriter Nicky Chinn. As seen on his Primary Wave Flips playlist, Pepin's work has connected modern artists including David Guetta, Sofi Tukker, and ODESZA to past hits by the likes of Whitney Houston, Bob Marley, and Luther Vandross.

In some ways, it's a very different assignment than management, but the throughline is clear. He's a curious and omnivorous music fan with an intense passion for helping songs reach as many ears as possible. Through his decades working in various roles in the business, he's done that over and over, and he's not stopping. "I'll always be the advocate for the artist because no one else will," says Joseph Pepin. "I think there are better and fairer ways of doing things, and if I can utilize my knowledge and skill set to try to do that, I'm going to do it, you know?"