About Ethan

Ethan Swope is an artist manager and A&R whose work spans the studio and the rollout. He is A&R Director at IMAGE CONTROL STUDIOS in Oakland, manages the artists Trill Bans and Monrøse, and leads artist relations and operations at Waterson Studios. Behind all of it is a recording engineer and producer whose credits have passed 39 million streams.

In 2026 Swope began managing Trill Bans, a San Diego producer with a platinum plaque and a #1 Billboard album to his name, who had stepped out as an artist at the front of the underground Mexican EDM sound. Within the year, Swope took him from Papas & Beer in Mexico to Salt Lake City, an opening slot for 3BallMTY, the Into The Horizon festival in San Diego and four Southern California dates supporting Chan, as his catalog passed 4.5 million streams. He also manages and develops Monrøse, an independent artist blending shoegaze with electronic production, building the project from the street up for a college audience.

At Waterson Studios, Swope and creative director Lindsey are building a multidisciplinary collective where filmmakers, musicians and photographers make projects none of them could make alone. He runs artist relations and operations, and the collective’s music arm, waterson.wav, gives artists creative direction and rollout support alongside their existing management.

His instinct for building artists came from building himself first. In 2024 he began releasing his own late-night, dark R&B reworks of The Weeknd, PARTYNEXTDOOR and Sade. The first, “Acquainted,” caught on with YouTube listeners on its own, so he carried the series to TikTok, where the remixes drew around 8 million views. Another 3 million came on YouTube, and listeners made tens of thousands of videos with his sounds. It became his playbook for artist marketing.

The foundation is the studio. Swope started making beats in 2020, at 13, and sold type beats on BeatStars without ever showing his face. In high school he learned to record, engineer and mix in Pro Tools, and by the end of 2022 he was running sessions out of his own bedroom studio. That year, the producers G3 and MarvinBeats found a loop kit he had posted to YouTube and brought him to San Diego to work with Lil Maru and 22gfay. He began working with producers in Los Angeles in 2023 and graduated high school a year early. By the end of 2024 he was in session at EMPIRE Studios with Lil Maru, and went on to work with 22nd Jim. He joined IMAGE CONTROL STUDIOS as a recording engineer in 2025, also working as a metadata analyst at Intellectual Property Collections, and was named A&R Director the following year.

That range is deliberate. At 19, Swope records, mixes and masters, produces, writes melodies and lyrics, shoots photos and reels, designs cover art, motion covers and graphics, and plans and manages the rollout around all of it, so that whatever a room needs, he can bring it.