Avex takes 85% of S10 Entertainment: a Japanese label group now owns a US artist manager

Avex, the Tokyo-listed music and anime company, has bought more of S10 Entertainment & Media, the Los Angeles artist management firm founded by Brandon Silverstein. The deal was reported on 29 September; Avex's release is dated 30 September and doesn't give a percentage. Music Week and Music Business Worldwide both report the new stake as 85%. MBW adds that there is an agreement to reach 100% over time. Neither gives a price, and both say the terms weren't disclosed.

This is not Avex's first step into US management. It is the point where a gradual buy-in becomes ownership, and the reasons tell you a lot about how Japanese pop is trying to travel.

What exactly did Avex buy?

According to Avex, the shares came from part of Silverstein's own holding and from other equity holders. The release names Myke Towers, Big Sean and Bella Poarch as S10 clients. Silverstein stays on as CEO of S10 and of Avex Music Group (AMG), Avex's US subsidiary. MBW and Music Week both report he remains an AMG board member and equity partner and takes on a wider role in Avex Group's global music strategy.

The build-up took about two years. Avex says its US arm first invested in S10 in May 2024, which was how it entered artist management in North America. That March 2025 filing shows the stake doubling from 20% to 40% in February 2025, and Silverstein becoming AMG's CEO from 1 April that year. The same filing describes S10 as co-founded in 2017 by Silverstein and Roc Nation. In May 2026, Avex's annual results deck listed a majority stake in S10 among the year's achievements. Now the reported figure is 85%.

Why does a Japanese label group want a US manager?

Avex says so directly. In the 2025 filing, it said it was buying in because the synergy had shown up in its own artists' overseas expansion. The plan is to use S10's management network to open overseas opportunities for Avex acts and speed up the global spread of IP from Japan. The new release names XG and ONE OR EIGHT as artists Avex will keep investing in. It also says AMG runs the group's North American business across recorded music, publishing, artist management, marketing and live.

The results deck shows what that looks like in practice. Avex says it has signed exclusive publishing deals with more than 30 overseas songwriters, and has them writing for its Japanese acts, including BE:FIRST, ONE OR EIGHT and STARGLOW. It reports about 5.91 million monthly Spotify listeners for XG, with an overseas ratio of roughly 80%. It also says XG is moving from the investment phase into the monetisation phase. ONE OR EIGHT's "TOKYO DRIFT" charted in 36 countries and regions, by Avex's count.

So the US company isn't the product. It's the route to market. A Japanese company can build a group in Tokyo. What it can't easily build from Tokyo is the network of US relationships that decides which songs, collaborations, sync slots and support tours an act gets offered. Buying a manager means buying that network along with the people who run it.

Is this a wider trend?

There's a clear precedent from Korea rather than Japan. In 2021, HYBE, the company behind BTS, bought all of Scooter Braun's Ithaca Holdings, which included the SB Projects management company and Big Machine Label Group. MBW later reported, from a Korean filing, that the total came to $1.05 billion. Avex's approach is smaller and slower: staged stakes over years, rather than one billion-dollar cheque. But the idea is the same. You buy the US management layer, not just a US label.

Tokyo has a policy reason to cheer this on. In 2024 Japan's revised Cool Japan strategy set a target of 20 trillion yen in overseas sales of Japanese content by 2033, roughly four times the 2022 level. That report focuses on games, anime and manga rather than music. Avex fits that picture: its results deck credits strong overseas anime sales for part of its growth. Net sales rose 11.3% to about ¥146.6 billion in the year to March 2026.

We haven't found a second Japanese company making the same kind of US management purchase recently. So we'd call this an Avex strategy with a Korean precedent, not yet a Japanese trend.

What it means for artists

For Japanese acts on Avex, the upside is concrete. A manager in Los Angeles, owned by your own company, has every incentive to take your calls. Writers signed to the same group are already being placed on your records. For acts trying to break outside Japan, that kind of access usually has to be paid for, or begged for.

For S10's existing US and Latin clients, the picture is more mixed. Their manager is now 85% owned by a group whose US arm also wants to be a label, a publisher, a live business and a $100 million catalogue buyer. Nothing public suggests any client has been pushed into an Avex deal. But the structure gives the manager's owner a commercial interest on the other side of the table.

What we think

Our reading is that Avex is buying the one thing J-pop has never been able to make at home: a US manager's phone book. The lesson we take from K-pop's export push is that great acts and big fanbases aren't enough on their own. You need people inside the US system who can get a group onto the right playlists, stages and features. Avex's staged route, 20% to 40% to majority to 85% with full ownership reportedly agreed, is a cautious way of buying that without betting a billion dollars at once. Keeping Silverstein as an equity partner keeps the person whose relationships it is actually paying for.

The winners are likely to be Avex's Japanese acts and the songwriters in its publishing roster. They get a direct line into US sessions and US management attention. The early sign is Avex's own deck putting XG's overseas ratio at about 80%. We'd treat that as the company's figure, not independent data.

The people to watch are S10's current clients. When a manager is owned by a company that also sells label, publishing, live and catalogue deals, the old question comes back: who is the manager working for when those deals land on the table? This isn't a claim that anyone has done anything wrong, and nothing public suggests that. It's a structural point. We think artists managed by a company owned by a label group should ask three plain questions. Does my management contract let me leave if ownership changes? Will any deal with an affiliated company be disclosed to me in writing, with independent advice? And is my commission ever taken on income from a company my manager's owner also profits from? Those questions were worth asking at 40%. At 85% and heading for 100%, they're essential.

For J-pop, this is a bet worth watching rather than a breakthrough. Avex has bought the infrastructure. Whether it produces a Japanese act that the US treats as a pop act, not a niche import, will show up in charts and tour grosses over the next two or three years, not in a press release.