Doechii at Blake High School in Tampa, Florida on Nov. 8, 2024. Credit: Dave Decker / Creative Loafing Tampa Bay
It’s been about 270 days since Doechii stood on the Grammy stage, accepted the award for Best Rap Album, and told the world about the city that raised her.
“There’s so many people out there who probably don’t know who I am,” the 26-year-old, whose real name is Jaylah Ji’mya Hickmon, said. “I call myself the Swamp Princess because I’m from Tampa, Florida! There is so much culture in Tampa. Whenever people think about Florida they only think about, like Miami, but Tampa has so much talent. Labels, go to Tampa. There is talent there.”
As the Blake High School graduate prepares to play her biggest headlining hometown show to date—did A&R actually listen?
“Literally, the next day, I had A&Rs that I hadn’t talked to in months, maybe years in some situations, calling me being like, ‘What’s in the water in Tampa? Tell me who should I be looking at,” Randy Ojeda told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. So he sent them all his long-running Tampa Mixtape, featuring his favorite locally-made music.
Ojeda, 35, is an entertainment lawyer who helps artists negotiate record and publishing deals, plus contracts with management and labels. While he spends his hours these days helping artists get paid what they’re supposed to, he used to work as an A&R for homegrown international distribution company Symphonic.
A&R (“Artists and Repertoire”) is romanticized as the people at labels who discover artists, maybe at a club, before signing them to record contracts. The reality is that in 2025—like baseball, and any other business—data drives decision-making in the music world. Chartmetric, a tool that tracks streaming charts, social media and the box office, is now a huge part of an A&R’s thought process, for better and worse.
Ojeda notes that while he knows he can get an A&R to listen to an artist, that’s about it. “If they go any further, that’s not up to me,” he said, adding that he knows of a few artists who’ve gained traction.
Sniper2004, from Carrollwood, got big off of a TikTok sound and is distributed by Interscope. FloGo filmed a video on the Gandy Bridge; he also just sold-out his first-ever concert this Thursday at Busch Boulevard’s Fuego VIP Lounge and is is being courted by labels. St. Petersburg’s Rod Wave, who once knocked Justin Bieber off the Billboard 200, has signed Tampa rapper Bigg 290 to his Mainstay Music Group.
Still, Ojeda concedes that he doesn’t know if there were any direct signings after Doechii’s huge night last February where she was nominated four times and joined Lauryn Hill and Cardi B as the only non-men to win the Best Rap Album Grammy award. That’s partly because Doechii is one-of-a-kind.
“Not only is she insanely talented, but she had that artistic vision from the very, very beginning. Even her earliest self-released music videos and EPs were of a quality that is just undeniable,” he added. A&R these days is looking for artists who have great content, and who advocate and market themselves—something that might be missing from some local artists. “I think we have a lot of talented artists who write great music, but they don’t put the whole package together,” Ojeda added.
Jorge Brea, founder and CEO of Symphonic Distribution, knows what it’s like to be on the ground floor when insane talent breaks and was involved with Bad Bunny when he was emerging out of the Rimas Entertainment group. Tampa’s Five 5 Studio facilitated a meeting between Brea and Doechii. Her 2020 EP, OhThe Places You’ll Go, was distributed on Symphonic, right before “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” went big on TikTok.
“I definitely remember seeing a lot of that energy of wanting to do well, wanting to be a big star, but not knowing much of how to do it,” he told CL. Brea noted that Top Dawg Entertainment, home to Kendrick Lamar, quickly pounced after “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” went viral, adding that, “I think that was ultimately the best home. I think that TDE has done a freaking amazing job.”
Brea, however, did not hear from A&Rs in hip-hop and even indie circles after Doechii’s Grammy win. There is endless quality when it comes to the artists that call Tampa Bay home, he said, expressing appreciation that she is flying the banner for the city. But the data-driven nature of how labels sign artists today ultimately wins. “It’s not a beautiful, uplifting, empowering thing, but it’s just the reality of it,” Brea said.
Artists have more routes than ever to be independent, Brea told CL, but should make music that can get them signed, if that’s their goal. Creating super fans, and finding fans outside of the Bay area, will go a long way, too. And there are more eyes on the city now.
While A&R might be flocking to sign artists locally, Doechii’s rise did put a bit of a spotlight on what’s happening in Tampa, and opened the door for music fans to talk about producers who came up locally. Jordan Patrick is currently working with A$AP Rocky and was recently joined by Jon Batiste in the studio. Batiste recently told CL that Patrick, a Jefferson High School graduate, reminds him a lot of himself.
“You’d be amazed at how many producers in this area have platinum plaques and gold plaques and are are producing really big records for guys like Kodak Black and NBA Youngboy,” Ojeda said, citing artists like Dxntemadeit it and Nolan Griffis (aka Nullybeats).
James Wood, who runs Clearwater’s Executive Studios, has two “Madden 24” placements and even recorded with Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Ray Ray McCloud. He’s seen producers like John Lam rack up plaques for the likes of Lil Durk and Rod Wave while songwriters like Fash (aka Ryan Rivera) just submitted tracks to Drake. “He already cut the records,” Wood, who also works with Plies, added.
Jerome Grace told CL that while Doechii—who played early shows at The Bricks, The Ritz, and Crowbar—drove the industry to pay better attention to Tampa, there wasn’t a rush to sign artists. Grace, CEO & Head of Music Pub and the Producer Tour publishing company, said he’d like to see more unity in the local scene, but loves that artists like Famous Kid Brick are a walking advertisement for Tampa. Homegrown artists, he said, always feel like they can come back to Tampa, and he hopes that one day they’ll feel like they can’t leave because so much is happening here.
“Doechii could serve as a catalyst, but it’s up to all of us to be able to build it all out,” he added.
This article appears in Oct. 16 – 22, 2025.
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