Maverick City Music (MCM) paused its relationship with artist Dante Bowe in 2022 because of a full frontal nude photo he posted to his Instagram stories, leaders confirmed in the inaugural episode of the podcast, “Mavericks on the Mic.” The two-hour conversation featuring Christian YouTuber Ruslan addressed a number of controversies Maverick City has faced since its founding in 2018.
“We’re very open-handed about the fact that we did stuff wrong. We didn’t handle every situation right,” said Norman Gyamfi, who co-founded the label TRIBL with Maverick City Music co-founder Jonathan Jay and co-founded Maverick City Music in its current iteration. “We believe we did some things wrong.”
“When you’re putting tens of thousands of people in different locales in arenas and lifting up the name of Jesus day in and day out, you’re gonna run into some opposition, and that opposition isn’t gonna be light,” Gyamfi said. “I don’t think we were prepared for that because at no point at the beginning of this, no one in the room said, ‘I’m a pastor. We’re starting a church.’ But to a generation of people, we were pastoring a generation of people into faith.”
Maverick City Music Addresses Dante Bowe Controversy
Maverick City Music is a Grammy Award-winning contemporary Christian music collective. However, it was launched in 2018, not as a collective or an artist, but as a publishing company with the purpose of addressing a lack of diversity in the music industry.
Ruslan joined Maverick City Music’s Norman Gyamfi, Jonathan Jay, and EJ Gaines, a music executive, entertainment lawyer, and Chief Strategy Officer of Insignia Assets, LLC. The four had a two-hour conversation about the group’s founding and evolution, as well as how the group chose to deal with a number of controversies.
Even though MCM started as a publishing company holding writing camps, the group quickly transitioned into being an artist, Jay said. The group was ground-breaking in the industry for not requiring the artists who participated to sign publishing deals. Gyamfi said that he was getting 25% royalties without having to sign anything, which is unheard of.
Maverick City saw enormous success after releasing its initial songs and going on its first tour, at which point leaders realized they needed to define who the group was and formalize their agreements with their artists. Along the way, they developed a code of conduct for artists to follow.
Gyamfi pointed out that Maverick City Music did not begin with the intention of raising up worship pastors and in fact did not even have the goal of becoming an artist. And even though the artists who joined MCM had to agree to a code of conduct, it was nearly impossible to prove any reported immoral behavior because the artists lived all over the country. When MCM leaders heard about anything concerning, those claims were mostly unverifiable rumors.
But it was the behavior of one artist in the collective, Dante Bowe, that led MCM to issue its first statement about an artist’s conduct, a topic Ruslan and the other three men addressed during their conversation.
