Keynote - Danny Goldberg, President, Gold Village Entertainment in conversation with Jem Aswad, Executive Editor, Music at Variety
Danny Goldberg, President of Gold Village Entertainment, manages the careers of Steve Earle, The Waterboys, and Martha Wainwright, among others. In previous decades, Goldberg managed Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Bonnie Raitt, Hole, and The Allman Brothers Band, and later led Atlantic Records, Warner Bros. Records, and Mercury Records Group. Goldberg began his career as a music journalist and publicist and is the author of six books. The conversation will explore the evolution of artist management, the changing relationship between artists and the industry, and Goldberg’s perspective on the future of the modern music manager.
Featured Speakers:
Danny Goldberg, President, Gold Village Entertainment
Danny Goldberg has worked in the music business as a personal manager, record company President, publicist and journalist since the late 1960s.
He currently runs the management company Gold Village Entertainment which was formed in 2007. Current clients include Steve Earle, The Waterboys and Martha Wainwright.
From 1983-1992, Goldberg was the President of Gold Mountain Entertainment, whose management clients included Nirvana, Hole, Sonic Youth, Bonnie Raitt, and The Allman Brothers Band.
From 1992-2005 Goldberg was a record company executive serving as President of Atlantic Records, Chairman of Warner Bros. Records, Chairman of the Mercury Records Group and Chairman of Artemis Records.
In the nineteen-eighties , Goldberg was Executive Producer of the soundtrack of music from the television series Miami Vice and was Music Supervisor of the film Dirty Dancing.
In 1980 Goldberg formed and co-owned Modern Records, which released Stevie Nicks’ solo albums . That same year he co-produced and co-directed the rock documentary feature, No Nukes starring Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, and Jackson Browne. In the mid nineteen seventies he was Vice-President of Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records.
Goldberg began his career as a music journalist having written for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and Billboard Magazine (for whom he reviewed the Woodstock Festival in 1969). He is the author of six books including Serving The Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain (Ecco Books, 2019). Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside The Rock and Roll Business which was first published in 2009 and which was re-issued in expanded form by Diversion books in March, 2026.
Goldberg’s most recent book is Liberals With Attitude: The Rodney King Beating and the Fight for the Soul of Los Angeles (Akashic Books, 2025).
Jem Aswad, who launched Variety’s music section with former executive music editor Shirley Halperin in 2017, has held senior editorial posts at Billboard, MTV News, Spin, Time Out New York and CMJ. He also has worked at three record labels (Atlantic, Warner and Caroline), two record stores, one performing-rights organization (ASCAP), moonlighted as an unpaid hand model for the cover photograph of a Hole single and even helped out at CBGB for a few weeks while one of said labels was filming a documentary there. A lifelong music obsessive, he started out writing concert reviews for his high school newspaper and over the years has been published in Rolling Stone, New York magazine, the Village Voice, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, the Trouser Press Record Guide and other publications. He has won several Los Angeles Press Club and Southern California Press Club awards — including the LAPC’s Journalist of the Year/ Online in 2021 and 2022 — appears regularly on television and at conferences speaking about music, and frequently guest-lectures at Syracuse University's Bandier (music business) Program and New York University. He is based in Variety’s New York offices.