At 15, Andre Benz launched a YouTube channel called Trap Nation from his bedroom. It became one of the largest electronic music curation brands on the platform, and the network he built around it, The Nations, grew past 50 million subscribers. In 2022, he sold it to Create Music Group.
“I was never trying to build a company at 15,” Benz says. “I just wanted to put good music in front of people. The company part happened because the audience kept growing and I had to figure out what to do with it.”
Most founders would have taken the exit and slowed down. Benz did the opposite. He spent his time inside Lowly, an imprint built on 50/50 profit splits and short-term licenses, learning the deal side of a business he had only watched from the curation side. Then in 2023, he co-founded broke Records with Brandon De Oliveira, his partner and the company’s COO.
The thesis was simple: the label system was too slow for the internet that now decides what becomes a hit. “The internet does not wait for quarters,” Benz says. Broke was built to move at the speed of the feed. Benz has said the company can sign a record and turn around content in under 24 hours, with the deal done, the advance paid, and marketing live in under 48. That operating model, more than any single signing, is what made the industry pay attention.
“Curation is the scarce resource,” Benz says. “Deals, marketing, content, all of that should be engineered to never slow the curator down.”
The recognition followed quickly. Benz was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Music list in 2024. He and De Oliveira were named to Billboard’s Indie Power Players list in 2025 and again in 2026. Profiles in Billboard, SPIN, Music Week, and The Source traced the same arc: a curator who learned the business mechanics early and rebuilt the label around them.
The proof is in the releases. The Source reported that broke had more TikTok-charting singles than any other label in 2024, with more than 15 singles hitting the Billboard charts that year. In one of the most telling anecdotes in the company’s short history, Sevdaliza turned down a deal with Republic Records to stay independent with broke. Benz has distilled the appeal to four words: “speed, efficiency, product ownership, and being intuitive.”
Benz is quick to name peers he respects, citing EMPIRE, 10k Projects, and 300 as companies doing similar work well. “There is plenty of room for labels that actually serve artists,” he says. “The ones that do are going to win the next decade.”
From a bedroom YouTube channel to a Billboard power list in under a decade, Benz’s career reads like a case study in what happens when the person picking the records also builds the machine around them.
Spencer Hulse is the Editorial Director at Grit Daily. He is responsible for overseeing other editors and writers, day-to-day operations, and covering breaking news.
