Diplo Launches Bison Music With Andrew Bergman

The roster existed before the announcement did. Diplo and Andrew Bergman, the former chief executive of Downtown Music Holdings, launched Bison Music on November 11, 2026, an independent music publisher based in New York and Los Angeles that says it'll find writers early, develop them over the long term and give them a real stake in what they create. Diplo had formed Bison first to bring a group of songwriters and producers together, and eight of them were already signed when Bergman came aboard as chief executive.

The front office is the credibility play. Bergman runs the company as chief executive, joined by chief operating officer Tom Lee, chief creative officer Juba Lee, who previously ran Diplo's Mad Decent Publishing, and general manager Jenny Ilibassi. That's a Downtown-scale executive team attached to a startup publisher, and it signals the intended business: not a celebrity vanity imprint, but a working publishing house with A&R, administration and development under one roof.

The signed writers carry credits that do the arguing. Picard Bros., Leclair, MAESIC, Nitti, Kaien Cruz, BomboCat, Akira Evans and Groupthink arrive with work for BTS, Dua Lipa, Bad Bunny and JENNIE on their records. Those are the writers behind other people's hits, which is precisely the population a publisher exists to serve: people whose songs travel further than their names do. Bison says further signings will be announced in the coming months.

"For me, there's still nothing more exciting in music than discovering a great song from someone you've never heard of," Bergman said. "We're designed to identify and sign writers early, nurture them through the harsh realities of the music business and allow them to reap the benefits of their creative efforts." The pitch is development over acquisition. The industry's recent money has chased catalogs, buying finished hit libraries as assets. Bison is betting the earlier end of the same river, on songs that haven't been written yet.

Diplo's own framing points the same way. "At a moment when it feels like music needs an injection of originality, our writers are in a position to shape where music goes next," he said. "Andrew and I are creating a home for those writers, with a team that knows how to develop them and a company built to back them for the long term." The company's stated mission echoes it, music written by real people, built to connect with a global audience.

The test is retention, and it won't report for years. A development publisher proves itself when a writer signed early re-signs after the first hit, instead of taking the catalog to a major. Bison has the executive, the producer and the opening roster. What it has to manufacture is a track record, one song at a time, in the part of the business where the credits are small and the money, eventually, isn't. The company is based in New York and Los Angeles, the two coasts where most American publishing deals are still signed, and it enters a market where independent publishers have been gaining share from the majors for a decade.