THE DEVOURING NEON

Mesmerized by the music managers

- ANDREW HAGAN

On any day of the week, you might find Scooter Braun working his magic in a pair of vintage Reeboks. He has a love of superior kicks, and was among the high-profile investors in StockX, the "stock market for sneakers." He's now forty-two, but some of us can still picture him in 2006, a college dropout riding around Atlanta with a writer from Creative Loafing, proclaiming his status as the guy who knows all the guys in the know. Braun, the son of two dentists from Greenwich, Connecticut, was already perfecting his hustle from basketball courts to boardrooms. "He's hustle concentrate," the hip-hop producer Jazze Pha said. "You ever made Minute Maid out of a can? That's the kind of hustle he's got." And this was before Braun raked in an estimated half a billion dollars from his various efforts, including serving as Justin Bieber's manager. He has also managed Ariana Grande, Carly Rae Jepsen, Idina Menzel, Demi Lovato, and the Kid Laroi. "He is as much the author of the pop music we listen to incessantly as are the artists on his roster," Amos Barshad wrote of Braun in "No One Man Should Have All That Power," his 2019 book about behind-the-scenes schemers. "He is, as much as anyone, controlling the last vestiges of the monoculture." But there's reason to wonder whether his profession like that of lamplighters, town criers, and cigarette girls-might be a thing of the past.