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The groundbreaking independent music company EMPIRE recently celebrated its fifteenth anniversary with EMPIRE15, a free concert in San Francisco’s Civic Center. With the majestic City Hall building serving as backdrop for the festivities, over 20,000 people gathered to enjoy performances from such local hip-hop talents as Larry June, Mistah F.A.B., DJ Umami, Berner, P-Lo, and Kool John. Also on the bill were enigmatic country-rocker Red Leather; Nigerian star Fireboy DML, who sang his international hit with Ed Sheeran, “Peru,” which includes the hook, “I’m in San Francisco jamming”; and country superstar Shaboozey, who was later presented with an RIAA Diamond certified plaque for selling more than 10 million units of his 2024 single “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” Moved to tears, Shaboozey thanked EMPIRE for believing in him for many years and promptly performed an encore of the anthem.
“I’m not the kind of person to stand on stage and marvel at my accomplishments in terms of how many records I’ve sold and that type of stuff,” EMPIRE CEO Ghazi said in an interview a few weeks later. “It was more about community impact, and what we’re doing for our communities and being the change you want to see. If there’s something that you don’t like, what do you do to change it? Are you just going to stand around and watch it transpire? Or are you going to do something about it? And that’s kind of my life story of why I even started EMPIRE as a company. Am I going to continue to watch people that I love do bad record deals? Or am I going to do something about it?”
Before starting EMPIRE, Ghazi served as a recording, mixing, and mastering engineer for a wide range of Bay Area rappers including the late Baba Zumbi, as well as working on the first releases from Compton’s The Game. This background built the artist-first mission of EMPIRE. “I think we’ve always excelled at finding artists who have strong identities and loyal followings and helped expand on those,” says COO Nima Etminan, who first met Kendrick Lamar as a journalist writing for his own West Coast rap-centric website DubCNN when they were both teenagers.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 13: Shaboozey performs at EMPIRE’s 15 year celebration at Civic Center Plaza on September 13, 2025 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Miikka Skaffari/Getty Images for EMPIRE)
“Hip-hop is always deeply ingrained in us, but our biggest artist is a country artist. But I think that the hip-hop ethos, the hustle in the way that we approach it, is definitely always there.” — Nima Etminan
Red Leather at EMPIRE 15 / photo by Andrew Rosas
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 13: (L-R) Mayor Daniel Lurie and EMPIRE CEO Ghazi participate at the EMPIRE’s 15 year celebration at Civic Center Plaza on September 13, 2025 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Miikka Skaffari/Getty Images for EMPIRE)
Etminan later signed Lamar to his first distribution deal with EMPIRE right as the company was getting started, and settled into his role as Robin to Ghazi’s Batman, an analogy made in early press articles that doesn’t do justice to the actual dynamics of this duo. Etminan’s natural A&R abilities then led him to the early recordings of Anderson .Paak, whose Free Nationals band still works with EMPIRE. “My friendship with Anderson is probably one of the closest friendships I have with artists,” Etminan says. Too $hort, an architect of Bay Area rap’s independent spirit, was also an early EMPIRE client, which made countless others take note and want to follow. “Too $hort has always shown up for Ghazi,” says Etminan. “They’ve had a really long relationship, and he was probably one of the first big artists that was going through EMPIRE very early on. They’ve spent a lot of time together, and I think that’s a relationship he really cherishes.”
Ghazi’s unwavering belief and investment in San Francisco caught the attention of Mayor Daniel Lurie, who believes that the arts and youthful music events like EMPIRE15 are helping to revitalize the city. “I think the amazing thing about him overall is that he’s willing to partner with anybody that he sees a dynamic thought process in,” Ghazi says of Lurie. “So if he sees leadership qualities, and he sees you working and activating the city, he’s gonna do whatever he can to help you. He’s progressive, he’s open-minded, he’s pragmatic. I think we’re watching a resurgence in the city. A lot of it has to do with him pounding the pavement every day and creating that energy. It’s creating a funnel around him of people like myself and a lot of others in the city that are far more elevated than I am who are investing back into San Francisco.”
Ghazi likens Mayor Lurie’s energy to “watching the same team flourish under one coach and barely make the playoffs under another coach. His ability to actionize the city is like no other.” In turn, Lurie, who introduced Shaboozey at EMPIRE15, clearly sees Ghazi’s role as a visionary. “He doesn’t look right in front of him—he’s looking way beyond,” Etminan says of Ghazi’s foresight. “He looks at technology, he looks at culture, he looks at economies, he looks at all of these things as opposed to getting caught up in the daily news cycle.”
Ghazi, Too Short, P-Lo
Nima, Nipsey Hussle, Snoop Dogg, Young Dolph
Fifteen years after launching the company’s forever headquarters in San Francisco, EMPIRE now also has offices in New York, London, and Johannesburg, large teams in Nigeria and Nashville, and territory managers in 20 different countries, including Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and all over Africa. “I think the global expansion has always been something that we had our eye on, and it’s been gratifying to get to touch all these different parts of the world,” says Etminan. “It’s funny because we dabble in all genres. Hip-hop is always deeply ingrained in us, but our biggest artist is a country artist. Afrobeats has been at the forefront of what we do. We’re doing a lot of electronic music. But I think that the hip-hop ethos, the hustle in the way that we approach it, is definitely always there. And then we’re diving into rock music.”
“Every time I go to Africa,” says Ghazi, “for me, that’s a spiritual journey, simply because they’ve experienced a lot of things that my people have experienced, which is imperialism, colonialism, so on and so forth. To go to a place like Nigeria that’s experienced a lot of tumultuous times, and to be able to find the beauty in the music and the beauty in the art and find a way to export it to other countries is pretty profound for me.”
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 13: Larry June performs at EMPIRE’s 15 year celebration at Civic Center Plaza on September 13, 2025 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Miikka Skaffari/Getty Images for EMPIRE)
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 03: BLK ODYSSY performs at EMPIRE Salutes The GRAMMYs With Adam Blackstone & Friends at City Market Social House on February 03, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Johnny Nunez/Getty Images for EMPIRE)
EMPIRE was instrumental in the GRAMMYs adding the Best African Music Performance category in 2024, which has benefited their associated artists and acts across the continent as well. “For a long time, I was trying to incubate and build a music business in San Francisco when everybody was abandoning San Francisco,” says Ghazi. “And so to go to Nigeria, build relationships there, convince those artists to come record in my city, and then make hit records there and spend time with the GRAMMY committee and YouTube—and then to watch those records get nominated for GRAMMYs and all that—is just a lot of 180s and a lot of 360 moments.”
In January, San Francisco Business Times reported that EMPIRE purchased One Montgomery, a former bank built in 1908 in San Francisco’s Financial District, for around $25 million. “Ghazi and I used to drive by the Capitol Records building [in LA],” remembers Etminan. “He would say, ‘How amazing would it be to have something like that in San Francisco, where young kids drive by it and think, ‘I wish I could work there one day’?’’ And I think that’s what this building represents.
“Early on, he would say that we’re trying to create infrastructure so that the next generation of artists, creatives, designers, videographers, editors, producers, and engineers who want to be in music or connected to it don’t have to move to LA or New York or wherever it might be, and have to leave home to make it. And now I get to interview potential candidates for jobs all the time that are out of high school or college, who say that they grew up dreaming of being in this building one day or talking to this company. So those are inspiring moments for sure.”
Super Bowl LX is coming to the Bay Area in February 2026, and EMPIRE intends to activate One Montgomery with four days of blockbuster events in conjunction with a beloved San Francisco brand, as well as some well-known national ones. Etminan says that 2026 will also bring more news about the rumored rooftop nightclub to be built in the space. EMPIRE has also signed on as an investor and source of music programming for Elevation Sky Park San Francisco, an immersive entertainment venue with three geodesic domes and a pyramid for events that plans to open in the winter.
With hip-hop’s hustle and a track record of long-term thinking and belief in independent artists, EMPIRE is poised to continue driving global music culture for years to come. FL
