Anderson .Paak Christens Amazon Music’s New L.A. Headquarters With Old-School Beats, Hundreds Of Fans

The Amazon
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Music lot party Tuesday night certainly lived up to its name. It was a lot of party.

Designed to mark both Grammy Week in Los Angeles and the move by Amazon’s streaming-audio creative studios into permanent digs on the suburban L.A. grounds where Amazon Prime Video also produces many of its shows, the lot party attracted hundreds of attendees to hear 13-time Grammy winner Anderson .Paak perform as his alter ego DJ Pee .Wee.

Amazon Music had plenty of reasons to celebrate. The company’s audio streaming service recently expanded free access to something like 100 million songs, as part of Amazon Prime subscriptions. That’s on par in scale, if not user flexibility, with market-leading subscription services from Spotify and Apple
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Music.

The Amazon Music division had been using temporary quarters (and a lot of work from home) the past couple of years elsewhere on Amazon’s sprawling complex at the Culver Studios in Culver City, Calif.

It’s part of a massive concentration of video-production facilities in the small city, which also is home to the Sony Pictures lot, production operations for Apple’s TV+ and Beats units, and Warner Bros. Discovery’s HBO/HBO Max. The mammoth permanent offices for Amazon Music opened a couple of months ago, occupying a several-hundred-foot-long, four-story building. Big as it is, the new headquarters is only part of Amazon’s very big Culver City footprint, which also includes the huge virtual-production stage that just opened further south on the lot.

On a more permanent and business-minded note amid the partying, the event also gave Amazon Music a chance to promote its just-finished “atelier” on the first floor of the new offices. The atelier includes a lounge-y area at one end with sofas, coffee table, and a big-screen TV. The rest of the room features work tables and display areas on the walls.

The atelier showcases to visiting musicians and their representatives the hoodies, tour T-shirts, vinyl and CD versions of albums, and other revenue-generating custom merchandise and distribution formats that Amazon can make and sell for the musicians, workers said.

Visitors were offered inscribed tote bags with a black T-shirt and tie-dyed Amazon Music bucket hat, with the option to get any of them custom embroidered at a stall across the walkway. That seems like another mini-trend in Los Angeles corporate shindigs. In December, Puma and esports organization Gen.G held a “winter formal” that featured on-the-spot customizable sneakers thanks to the work of artisans from Majorwavez, which runs classes for making personalized kicks and clothes.

And like any good corporate party these days, the Amazon Music event also was mindful of the many musicians, influencers and other frequent posters to social media who were attending. Multiple areas were set aside as locations for memorable photos, either taken by a professional in a semi-studio setting, or striking abstract backdrops for the DIY creator.

For his part, .Paak was having what appeared to be a very good time, spinning well past the putative 7 pm end of the party, interacting repeatedly with one extremely dance-minded bearded bro in a trucker hat, and exhorting the crowd into sing-alongs to classics such as Whitney Houston’s I Want To Dance With Somebody.

An exuberant .Paak, dressed like a disco king from the 1970s, acknowledged onstage that he’d imbibed plenty of the hard-to-find $150 bottles of rum that festooned the dais (hint, the rum is from the Panamanian distillery co-owned by Bruno Mars, .Paak’s partner in Silk Sonic, which won five Grammys last year, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year).

As .Paak spun “a whole vinyl set, no computers,” he dug through the portable crates for R&B, soul, pop, and hip hop tracks pulled from the past 50 years, including two by Michael Jackson (”It’s the sound,” .Paak explained of his choice of two from the controversial King of Pop. “There’s a disconnect.”)

But .Paak also mixed in a significant amount of his own music, vamping over backing tracks, the sound further augmented by live trumpet stabs, trills, and riffs by jazz musician Maurice “Mobetta” Brown.

The Amazon event is one of several prominent appearances right now for .Paak/.Wee. Last week, .Wee manned the decks in Park City, Utah, performing at one of the big corporate parties dotting the Sundance Film Festival’s opening weekend. This coming Sunday, he’s in the mix to win yet another Grammy, this time with Mary J. Blige for best R&B performance on Here With Me.