On a humid summer night at DC10 in Ibiza, the vibe inside the club is “controlled chaos.” But one person in particular maintains a serene presence amid the party’s banging kickdrum.
Understated in jeans and a t-shirt on the club’s sprawling backstage patio, Alberto Brigado is the founder of Prime Culture, the management company that works with PAWSA, the DJ in the booth tonight. The company also represents DJ/producers including English phenom Michael Bibi, Dutch duo ANOTR and other electronic acts carving out a distinct, and increasingly large, presence in dance music. With PAWSA and Bibi among his first management clients, Prime Culture is also strongly associated with Solid Grooves, the label co-founded by the English producers, which is also the name of the party happening here tonight.
Related
The dancefloor is sardine-level packed, but it’s tame compared to the scenes that defined Brigado and Prime Culture’s earlier days on the island. After he started working with Bibi and PAWSA in 2014, they booked a Solid Grooves residency at the former Ibiza club, Privilege. Trying to save money during the season, the guys stayed together in a nearby villa, where they started hosting afterparties.
“At the beginning it was just us,” says Brigado. “Then some friends start coming, and then fans were arriving to the villa, and it became an actual afterparty.” When videos of this party went viral in 2018, “that created a name for us in Ibiza,” Brigado says. “We were these new kids that do the residency and have the villa party every Sunday.”
They knew they were onto something when, Brigado continues, “strangers were coming into the villa and telling us they were friends with the Solid Grooves guys.” Soon, other DJs were asking if they could come play, and aspiring attendees were jumping the fence to gain entry.
Named for the kind of culture it works to nurture and promote, Prime now employs nine managers who look after 33 artists including Carlita, Ben Sterling and Beltran. All in, the roster reads like the cool kids’ table at house and techno high school. Last year, Brigado and Prime Culture manager Michael Discenza expanded the business by creating Select Culture, a booking agency for rising management clients. Prime Culture now also has in-house event production and A&R departments to support its roster.
The hybrid structure is working: Bibi and PAWSA are both hard ticket and festival draws in the U.S. and Europe, where a 2024 headlining show by Bibi in London’s Finsbury Park drew 45,000 attendees and a 2025 show by PAWSA at the city’s Gunnersbury Park brought a crowd of 25,000. Meanwhile, ANOTR’s “Talk to You” (featuring 54 Ultra), debuted at No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic songs chart earlier this year, spending 29 weeks on the tally.
“The vision is for it to be something managers want to be part of not just for the salary,” says Brigado. “They’re their own bosses and can build a roster themselves. It’s a community of managers and artists more than a pyramid structure. Everyone has freedom.” This freedom extends to the artists, who don’t sign management contracts with Prime. “Other management agencies have three-year contracts; I don’t have that with any of my artists,” he continues. “Any artist can leave at any time.”
Born in Madrid, Brigado worked as a paramedic before getting into music almost by accident, when, at age 19, he helped an artist from the Dominican Republic book shows in Europe. Brigado advised this artist to just announce a tour and put Brigado’s phone number on the announcement so promoters could call him to set up shows, which they did. “We were using some contract I found on the internet,” Brigado says. But while he was green, he was also a fast learner, and the successful 20-date tour led to a run working with Dominican hip-hop artists in Europe.
Brigado had been going to Ibiza for fun since he was a teenager, “but I didn’t have any clue about electronic music,” he says. That changed when a Dominican artist came to Madrid and needed a studio space. Brigado connected this artist with Spanish DJ/producer Dennis Cruz, who had a studio in the city. Cruz told Brigado he needed a manager and Brigado took the gig, immersing himself in music by Euro final boss DJs like Marco Carola and Luciano — and feeling, in his words, like “maybe this has a future.”
Cruz was getting loads of requests from labels and promoters, but Brigado couldn’t do the work as extensively as he wanted given that he didn’t speak English. In 2014, he moved to London to learn the language, along with the ins and outs of the U.K. dance industry. This is where he met Bibi and PAWSA, who’d just founded their independent dance imprint Solid Grooves and were interested in releasing music by Cruz.
“They didn’t have a manager, so I was like, ‘What about getting together to do it?’” Brigado recalls. They accepted, and in 2015 Brigado created the management company SG Artists, named after Solid Grooves. The goal was to expand Solid Grooves events outside the U.K., which Brigado focused on while also signing rising artists. (“At the beginning I had a couple of different emails with different names, one for accounting, one for logistics, and it was all me,” he says with a laugh.) The first international dance show he booked was a club set for Cruz in Bulgaria. They made 500 bucks.
“I was also traveling with him and basically spending more money than I was making in commissions just to meet people and network,” he says. The 2016 Ibiza season was the first one Brigado attended as part of the Solid Grooves team, via Bibi and PAWSA’s residency at Privilege (the label had done residencies at clubs like Sankeys in seasons prior.) The following year, they hosted a huge Solid Grooves residency at the island’s open-air venue Benimussa Park, then returned to Privilege for a Sunday night residency in 2018 — the era when fans began swarming the Solid Grooves villa to get inside its buzzy parties.
“We were small, fully independent DJs,” Brigado says, “but we were already making noise.” Around this time, he changed the company’s name to Prime Culture.
Naturally, those knocking at the door also included DJs who wanted to be part of the company. Now, seven years later, Prime is home to an ecosystem of artists with similar sounds and aesthetics who often share stages and festival billings, a goal from the beginning. “Culture-wise, what we’re creating needs to all be a similar sound and vibe, because one of the key things is that the artists help each other,” Brigado says.
“Working with Alberto has played a huge role in our growth, both personally and in our career,” ANOTR says in a joint statement. “From the beginning, he understood our vision and helped us to develop ourselves as artists and never tried to change who we are or what we want ANOTR to be. Instead, he’s always helped us turn our ideas into something bigger and pushed us to think beyond what we thought was possible.”
“We support artists on their vision,” says Brigado. “If someone wants to do a new record label [or a new party] we always support them to have their own projects.”
To execute these projects, Prime has an in-house production team led by head of production Kelamo Masali, that helps artists develop and expand their event brands. These include Miguelle & Tons’ Two and a Half Cats, Dennis Cruz’s Botaniq, Bibi’s One Life series (launched after the producer announced in late 2023 that he was in remission from brain cancer), along with ANOTR’s No Art, which this year drew 25,000 attendees in Amsterdam in July and 20,000 in Manchester in May. With these shows, the idea is to extend artists’ influence beyond releases and traditional touring, with the production team also helping ensure artists’ visions are aligned with the show contracts they’re signing.
Meanwhile the in-house A&R team, led by head of music Stephanie Moran, helps develop a wide range of releases. Brigado advises that they’ll likely soon hire someone to facilitate studio sessions, with the idea to continuously fill gaps in artist services. Management agencies with such additional services are becoming more common across genres, although still relatively rare. What’s especially unique is Prime Culture’s in-house agency, Select Culture.
While headliner-level Prime artists like ANOTR and Bibi are represented by the big agencies, “some of the artists don’t want to be with a bigger agency because they get lost,” Brigado says. “With Select Culture, you get more focused attention.” He adds that having an in-house agency also saves artists money, because they’re not being charged compounding management and agency fees.
The first Select Culture office opened in June of 2025 in Miami to help the team focus on bookings in the U.S., a focus market amid dance’s current popularity surge in the States. “The U.S. scene has grown massively,” Brigado says. “Before it was just about EDM, and now I think house music has taken over a lot of the spaces and audiences EDM used to own.”
Earlier this year Brigado also established Select Culture Europe in partnership with David Nus and Javier Castro with offices in Madrid and Ibiza. Select Culture now operates globally and reps white hot names like Mau P (in Europe and South America), Max Styler (in Europe and MENA) and Mita Gami (in Europe, South America, Asia and Australia.)
“It’s growing faster than we were expecting,” says Brigado, who acknowledges that creating the agency got the attention of the majors. “We explained, because it was the truth, that at the beginning, it was just a platform for smaller artists, but let’s see in the future.”
Brigado says that so far, the secret of his success is simple: being honest and straightforward and “discussing without forcing. I think it’s important to not rush in, to be humble and to understand each artist’s situation… When you make choices based just on the numbers, there is a big part of the creative course of the artist’s work that you’re maybe choosing wrong.”
“What makes Alberto special is how personally invested he is,” says ANOTR. “It never feels like he’s just managing a career or making business decisions. He genuinely cares about the people he works with. He knows when to push us, and when to protect us.”
As Brigado frames it, the plan for Prime Culture is to continue growing horizontally (“That’s maybe why Prime is not a business that is the most attractive for a corporation to buy”), adding managers who can eventually become partners “so the vision doesn’t stop with one or two people” and creating projects that don’t just feel like business moves, but like actual culture.
While the scale has changed, Prime Culture’s M.O. is still, essentially, to get fans and artists so excited about these projects that they’re willing to jump the metaphorical fence to be part of them. Eight years in, the only difference is how many people are lining up outside.