Warner Music’s Max Lousada Promises ‘Incredible Surprises’ at Dua Lipa’s Glastonbury Set

Mark Sutherland Max Lousada is buzzing. Warner Music Group’s CEO of Recorded Music is back in his hometown, London, and the sun has come out for what feels like the first time in a spectacularly sodden summer, even by dismal British standards. Both the rays and Lousada have returned just in time for Glastonbury, the legendary festival that attracts 200,000 fans and features hundreds of artists across a weekend of music, mayhem — and, in most years, mud.

“Glastonbury is one of the real pillars of the year,” Lousada enthuses from his London office. “I’m always there for all three days – it’s one of the truly magical music events in the calendar.” This year, however, Lousada has even more reason to be excited about heading down to Worthy Farm. That’s because WMG provides two of the festival’s Pyramid Stage headliners, Dua Lipa and Coldplay (Sony’s SZA completes the line-up of bill-toppers).

In a first for the festival, Coldplay and Lipa’s sets will be available on a global livestream on BBC.com. Meanwhile, further down the bill, an array of other acts affiliated with WMG feature, including Burna Boy, Janelle Monáe, Anne-Marie, Rachel Chinouriri, Charli XCX and NewDad. And, Lousada claims with a mischievous smile, their dominance could have been even greater.

“I’m not going to say who the act was, but at one point it looked like we were going to have all three headliners,” he says. “That would have been amazing. I’m always greedy, so I wish I had three, but I’ll take two…” (He declined to comment further, but Madonna, who brought her back catalog to Warner in 2021, was a persistent rumor.) Lousada can afford to be relaxed.

Warner’s Glastonbury supremacy is emblematic of a major label operation that is firing on all cylinders. Its triumphs extend all around the world, with Lousada gleefully listing successes from Argentina (where Maria Becerra recently became the first female domestic artist to headline El Monumental, River Plate soccer team’s 70,000-seater stadium in Buenos Aires) to China (where Charlie Zhou has sold more than a million copies of his “Shenself” album), and most points in between. Things are also looking good closer to home.