Two weeks after announcing her not-so-amicable split from Warner Music, Brazilian superstar singer Anita has inked Universal with Republic Records. The Republic refused requests for comment. The singer, who is managed by Brandon Silverstein at S10 Entertainment, left Warner after 11 years with the company, and the company’s Warner Records label has made a major effort to break the singer in the U.S. with her multi-genre latest album, “Versions of Me. ” was released a year ago.
Despite a blockbuster performance at last year’s Coachella festival, the song “Evolver” (which has garnered more than 500 million streams on Spotify) received massive international success and album collaborations with hitmakers like Max Martin, Ryan Tedder, and Stargate. The album wasn’t a hit in the U.S. — with features from Saweetie, Missy Elliott, Khalid, and Maluma to name a few, but she remains a superstar in Latin America and elsewhere.
She made significant progress in the U.S. winning an MTV Video Music Award, receiving a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and co-hosting the Latin Grammy Awards – before parting ways with the company; Sources say that she paid “millions” to get out of her contract. “After eleven years of a successful partnership, we have agreed to go our separate ways,” read a statement from the label and the artist.
“Anita would like to thank the entire Warner Music team for their support. And the Warner team wishes Anita all the best in her future endeavors. Shortly before the breakup, Anitha took to social media to express her displeasure with the company, posting various notes about their lack of care and communication. In a screenshot of an email she purportedly sent to the CEO of one of Warner’s many music divisions, she noted that she had to ask the label to do “things that you naturally do,” and concluded her argument.
She’s “going to hire a new guy [whose] job is to ‘ask Warner to do their thing every day’.” “When you’re young and don’t know much, you should be very careful what you sign,” she wrote on Twitter. On Instagram, she posted, “I asked the label to do the simple thing they’re supposed to do: promote my music.” Although she did not elaborate on her said mistakes, Anita hinted that she was pressured to include the featured artists to improve her chances of a hit song. In her native Brazil, Anitta is in a league of her own, with a social media following of 84 million people between Instagram and Twitter.