Meet the Manager Who Helped Guide Laufey to Superstardom
Categoria: Musica
Foundations partner Max Gredinger believed the jazz-pop singer-songwriter's potential was limitless from the start — and supported her transformative past year.
Por Billboard | 30/07/2026
Max Gredinger has a theory about why — as a teen growing up outside Boston who ran a hip-hop blog and loved mixtape culture — he had the confidence to not only firmly decide on a career in the music industry but start managing artists. “Realistically? Probably arrogance,” Gredinger says with a laugh. “A feeling that I knew something that people who were far more seasoned than I didn’t know.” That feeling didn’t exactly lead him astray: Through a friend who knew Mike Posner’s cousin, Gredinger ended up crafting the digital marketing plan for Posner’s first mixtape (which led to the artist’s global breakthrough hit, “Cooler Than Me”) as a high school junior. He ultimately graduated from Syracuse University’s Martin Bandier Program for Recording and Entertainment Industries. But Gredinger, who’s now a partner at management company Foundations, gleaned a bigger lesson from his youthful confidence: “There’s a total benefit to not knowing how the business works when you’re just entering the workforce, because you don’t even think about things in or outside the box — you don’t even understand the concept of a box.” Related Billboard’s 2026 40 Under 40 List Revealed Chris Brown Pleads Guilty to Lesser Charge of 'Affray' in 2023 London Club Assault Case Soulja Boy Requests DNA Test for Son With Ex Jackilyn Martinez That mentality is now helping the 35-year-old guide the career of one of today’s most unconventional artists: the jazz-classical-pop-blending, Icelandic Chinese singer-songwriter Laufey. With the 2025 release of A Matter of Time (the follow-up to her Billboard 200 top 20 album Bewitched two years prior), Laufey had an astonishing breakthrough year, topping four Billboard album charts ( Independent , Jazz , Traditional Jazz and Vinyl Albums ), notching her first Billboard 200 top 10 and winning her second Grammy for best traditional pop vocal album. She also embarked on a still-ongoing tour that’s taken her to arenas like New York’s Madison Square Garden. Across its first 43 shows, the run has grossed $47.2 million and sold 446,000 tickets — increases of 432% and 245%, respectively, from the 2023-24 Bewitched tour. “I was immediately struck by all of it: her voice, her playing, and I absolutely fell in love with the music,” Gredinger recalls of when, during the pandemic, his then-assistant (Jackie Karlsson, now Laufey’s operations manager) first directed him to videos of covers she was posting online. Upon meeting, he and Laufey bonded over their mutual love of Norah Jones. “She just had this from-go mandate of what she wanted to do and this unrelenting drive,” as well as “adamance that [her music] be for Gen Z, her generation, first,” Gredinger remembers. “Management only works at scale when the artist is the most committed person by far — and she works her ass off, she cares so much.” The A Matter of Time rollout took shape in February 2025, with two days of global team meetings at opera house Harpa in Reykjavík, Iceland,