Tina Davis, current EMPIRE president and former manager of Chris Brown, says parents were “dropping their kids off at hotels” with intentions of marriage at one point in the Grammy winner’s career.
For those unfamiliar, Davis’ years of behind-the-scenes impact in the music industry includes a decade at Def Jam and the founding of Phase Too, the latter of which saw her managing Brown. More recently, Davis and the EMPIRE team became one of 2024’s biggest industry success stories with the blockbuster success of Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”
During a recent NandoLeaks interview, Davis was asked about the period in Brown’s career immediately following his 2009 assault of Rihanna. At the time, photos surfaced showing Rihanna’s injuries, with Brown ultimately pleading guilty to a felony. As Davis recalled, radio wasn’t touching Brown’s music, which presented a problem from an artist management perspective as radio was still king at the time.
To illustrate the difference in how Brown was viewed by the public before and after his assault of Rihanna, Davis pointed out that “everyone loved him” earlier in his career.
“At that point, you had to have radio,” Davis explained. “There were no DSPs and different other platforms for you to use to break. No TikTok. Twitter wasn’t even around really. It was just starting. So it was hard to try and get him over that hump or get people to change their minds because before it happened everyone loved him.”
Davis continued, “Parents were dropping their kids off at hotels like, ‘Go get Chris Brown! Go get him!’ and I’m like, ‘If you don’t put your daughter back in your car. Stop!’ Parents were sending their kids to the hotel. It was that bad. Because he was a sweetheart to the world, right? So they were like, ‘He’s a good kid. I want you to marry this kid. Go get him.’”
Davis made it clear that no one on Brown’s team supported this type of behavior, with security enlisted to shut down such incidents.
“Parents do that, yes,” she said. “It’s ridiculous. Fortunately, him, his mom, and all of us were not down with that. We were like, no, take your child and leave.”
From there, the conversation returned to radio’s importance during this era of the music industry. Radio, undeniably, was integral to a song’s longevity, which in turn helped secure the success of an album and the artist behind it. After the assault, Davis and the rest of Brown’s team took a strategic approach to ensuring he would return to the radio format. In short, they opted to “keep flooding the business” with mixtapes and features, thereby ensuring Brown would eventually land back in rotation.
Eventually, after a period of working to find fresh producers and writers, Brown was played an early version of what would become “Deuces” with Tyga and Kevin McCall. The track peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has since been certified triple-platinum by the RIAA.
“[Tyga] was the only that would stand right next to him and do videos and whatever else with him,” Davis said of Brown’s frequent collaborator, who is also the one who first introduced Brown to director Colin Tilley.
Brown’s most recent album, 11:11, was released just over a year ago through RCA and the singer’s own CBE. The album launched in the No. 9 spot on the Billboard 200 chart, later earning multiple nominations at the 2025 Grammy Awards.
