Troy Carter is a $60 million dollar music manager and CEO from the United States. Troy Carter, who was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, began his career in the entertainment industry as a member of the Overbrook Entertainment team led by Will Smith and James Lassiter.
From there, he moved into the music industry, where he worked in the marketing department of renowned record company Bad Boy Entertainment from 1995 until 1999. He left Bad Boy to start his own business, Erving Wonder, a boutique management firm that went on to handle Eve, Nelly, and Floetry, among others.
Mr. Carter founded Coalition Media Group and the Atom Factory a few years later after the Sanctuary Group purchased the management company. Coalition Media Group and the Atom Factory have since gone on to achieve enormous success.
Lady Gaga’s career is managed by the company, as are the careers of a number of up-and-coming musicians, such as YouTube star Greyson Chance and the young multi-cultural pop group Mindless Behavior.
Life and work
Early life and career starts, 1972–1998.
Troy Carter was born in West Philadelphia on November 14, 1972, and attended Huey Elementary and Sayre Middle School.
Carter’s parents split when he was two years old. His father, who had remarried, shot and killed his new wife’s brother following an altercation when he was seven years old, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Despite this, his father and stepmother remained together, and his father rebuilt his life after his release from jail, with Carter referring to him as “one of my real heroes.”
Carter left out of West Philadelphia High School in 1990, at the age of 17, to pursue a career in the music industry with his high school rap duo 2 Too Many, and was eventually signed to Will Smith and James Lassiter‘s label WilJam Records.
After the group’s contract was terminated after a year, Carter went on to work in the studio for DJ Jazzy Jeff and as a personal assistant for Lassiter. Carter attempted to start a creative relationship with Will Smith’s recording studio in Philadelphia when he was 22 years old.
He was marketing rap events for musicians like The Notorious B.I.G. in Philadelphia a year later. Carter met record producer Sean Combs through this, and he was hired as an intern for Bad Boy Records in New York City for a year and a half.
Carter traveled to Los Angeles when his apprenticeship at Bad Boy ended in order to work with James Lassiter again, only to be sacked and sent back to Philadelphia.
According to Lassiter, his decision was driven in part by his opinion that Carter had developed an entitled attitude, adding, “I would continually discuss it with him, emphasizing the need of having a strong work ethic and starting at the bottom and working his way up. When he turned it down, I advised him to return to West Philadelphia.
He had to go back in time and go through it himself in order to come out the other side.” Carter struggled to find success in Philadelphia for the following many years, describing it as one of his “darkest times.”
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Career from 1999 to the present
Carter met then-emerging rap singer Eve in Germantown in 1999, after several years of working in Philadelphia, and she requested him to be her manager. Carter also began managing other rap artists, including Nelly and Floetry.
Carter co-founded the talent management company Erving Wonder with Jay Erving, the son of former basketball player Julius Erving, in the same year.
Carter has worked with American singers Eve (left) and Lady Gaga (right)
Carter returned to Los Angeles in 2003 and assisted Eve in landing her own UPN show. Carter and Erving sold Erving Wonder to Sanctuary, a British firm, the following year, with Carter acting as executive vice president.
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Erving Wonder’s contract with Sanctuary fell apart during the next two years, Eve fired him, and by 2006, Carter had not only lost all of the money from the Sanctuary transaction, but he was also significantly in debt. His car was repossessed and his mortgage was foreclosed.
As Carter was about to be evicted from his home, record producer Vincent Herbert, who had recently left Universal Records, connected Carter to a new client, Lady Gaga, who had recently been dropped from Def Jam Records.
Carter, Herbert, and Gaga spent the next year touring California, performing at many bars each night with little money and assistance. Carter also created Coalition Media Group in 2007, and its management branch Atom Factory in 2010.
He co-founded The Backplane in Silicon Valley in 2011 to “redefine social media” by allowing celebrities and corporations to “communicate with fans, develop community, and cultivate brand loyalty.”
Carter was also nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety, Music, or Comedy Special in 2011 for his work on the HBO special Lady Gaga Presents the Monster Ball Tour: At Madison Square Garden, alongside Lady Gaga, Vincent Herbert, Jimmy Iovine, and Mo Morrison.
Carter has managed a slew of additional acts after signing Lady Gaga in 2007, including John Legend, Greyson Chance, Mindless Behavior, Priyanka Chopra, Lindsey Stirling, Meghan Trainor, The Ceremonies, and Pia Mia. In 2014, Lady Gaga sacked him.
He is a member of The Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Fellows class of 2012. He serves on the board of advisors of State.com, a ‘opinion-network’ start-up. Carter made an appearance as a guest Shark on Shark Tank’s seventh season, which premiered on October 9, 2015. In 2016, Carter was nominated to Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul 100 list of notable leaders and visionaries.
Carter revealed in July 2018 that he would leave Spotify in early September and take on an advisory position. Carter was accused of failing to return a debt by Ithaca Holdings in a case that was settled out of court in 2019.
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