John JP Pegram
President & CEO
John ‘JP’ Pegram is committed to making the music industry pay attention to the corner he’s carved out for himself. For over 20 years, he’s been cultivating relationships with music industry fixtures on all ends of the spectrum. From work with radio to consulting major labels and independent imprints, Pegram’s Rolodex alone should prove his value. But in 2015, he admitted to himself that he needed more. “I wanted to cultivate artists again,” he shares. “And I started looking at the industry and seeing that one of the biggest problems that these artists were having was that they weren’t being developed anymore. They didn’t know how to talk or conduct interviews. They didn’t have any stage presence. They didn’t have any je ne se quois.” Pegram is hoping to offer an alternative for these artists, with the inception of Creative Culture, a management company and independent label. A native of Nashville, TN, Pegram had always loved music, everything from the instrumentation to the lyrics and gradually even the inner workings of the business appealed to him. It only made sense that he would intern for the college station at Fisk University when he was an undergrad and later, at the city’s premier hip-hop and R&B station, 92Q. After high school, Pegram found himself in New Orleans working as an in-house engineer at Cash Money Records and this is where he met Dino Delvaille, his friend of 25 years and co-founder of Creative Culture. But long before Creative Culture was conceived, Pegram decided to cash in on the relationships he’d built through radio. He offered consulting services and started working one-on-one with artists and their teams on the best ways to capitalize on a growing buzz through marketing, promotion and all the other elements that create a star. Solid work attracts multiple customers, so when word began to drift about what Pegram had been doing, J-Roc of the infamous BMF collective, scouted him out and convinced him to relocate to Atlanta. With his knowledge of mixing and engineering, Pegram kept hearing from colleagues that he ought to open a recording studio after settling in Atlanta, so in 2020, he took $100,000 of a recent commission check and built Creative Culture Studios. “For the past 20 years, I’ve been consulting and working for other artists' management,” Pegram explains. “I’ve been helping them manage artists behind the scenes. I did that so much but wasn’t getting the accolades of actually being the artists’ manager.” Now he and Delvaille are focused on affecting change in a sometimes stale environment where the formula for success is never the same for long. But Pegram has staunch ideas on what some boutique labels are doing wrong. “I think they’re no longer in love with the music,” he offers matter-of-factly. “Because they bought their Rolls Royce and they bought their house so now they want to keep making the cake without putting the great ingredients in there. But I think the success corrupts and it’s not that they’re doing it intentionally.” Creative Culture already has nine artists under commitment -- Pegram holds their first signees, girl group 4Twnty in high regard. The young women are sweet, talented and beautiful, but it’s what they could represent for their fans that pulled Pegram in. “I saw two really beautiful girls that I thought could be stars,” he shares. “When I saw them, I was tired of seeing the same light skinned, green-eyed... Or some variation of that girl, and saw these two amazingly beautiful Black women and I said to myself, ‘I need to do this for me.’” He says that he thought of his daughters. “I wanna give them something they can be proud of. A group they can see themselves in. That’s when I started putting my heart and soul into 4Twenty.” After years of working in the industry with every kind of artist and management team, Pegram is set on finding and developing the next big stars. Every artist on the Creative Culture roster is important and has some special meaning to the executive, finally in full control of the narrative. A far way from behind-the-scenes.
