Natascha Augustin, who was named managing director of Warner Chappell Music Germany in January, started at the company as a half-time intern, rotating among various departments. She didn’t yet know what she wanted to do, and when an executive asked her, “I said I wanted to be a bookkeeper,” she remembers with a laugh. “Because there were two old ladies there who every afternoon ate cake.”
“He said, ‘You are not a bookkeeper’ – he knew better.” So, she became an A&R assistant at Warner Chappell in Munich.
The way Augustin talks about music publishing in Germany – the only big country in which Warner Chappell is No. 1 by market share, with 27.8%, according to Official German Charts data – it’s actually hard to imagine her doing anything else. And aside from internships in New York at Matador Records and Beggars Group, and a short stint at Warner Chappell in LA., she really hasn’t.
Augustin owes much of her success to the rise of German hip-hop – Deutschrap – now the country’s biggest genre by market share. Years ago, Augustin got a call from Farid Bang, a German rapper of Moroccan-Spanish descent, who asked her about a publishing deal. At the time, “German rap was the enfant terrible of the music industry,” remembers Augustin, sitting in the airy listening room of Warner Music Central Europe’s new Berlin headquarters, but “I met with him and his story was interesting – he had done it all himself.”
At a time when the genre was still dominated by imported American stars, indie labels and underground artists, Augustin went all in. “People would call him” – Bang – “and he’d send them to me,” Augustin says. “I just met them on an equal level.”
In 2010, Augustin was named head of A&R. (She was subsequently promoted to Senior Creative Director and then vice president.) Within a decade, Warner Chappell had the No. 1 market share in Germany. This implies an even more impressive record of success with German songwriters given that the company is No. 3 globally and gets less market share in Germany from global music than its competitors.
In some cases, Augustin says, she became “the main point of contact in the industry” for rappers that had independent label or distribution deals. But she also signed a number of major label stars, including Capital Bra, Luciano and Apache 207 – who, with iconic singer Udo Lindenberg had the No. 1 single of 2023, “Komet.” (The song was written in part by Apache 207 and the producer Sira, another Augustin signing.) In 2023, she signed the superstar Shirin David, who might be thought of as a Made-in-Germany Nicki Minaj. “Shirin was very influential,” says Augustin, who still lives in Munich but also spends considerable time in Warner Music Central Europe’s offices in Hamburg and Berlin. “She brought the American rap idea here for women.”
In 2021, Augustin also played a key role in launching Atlantic Records in Berlin as a label focused on German hip-hop – an unusual joint role in recorded music for a publishing executive. She leveraged her connections in hip-hop to sign Yung Hurn, DJ Stickle, and Lil Zey, among others, but with the hiring of an executive to lead Atlantic and Augustin’s promotion, she’s now free to focus exclusively on publishing. One priority for the year ahead is Ayliva, a young rap star who writes her own songs and was the second-most-streamed artist last year after Taylor Swift.
