When Triple Tigers co-president Kevin Herring announced he was stepping down from the position on July 6, he set up a new dynamic for the country music business.
Raffaella Braun took over the position after serving as vp of radio promotion. She teams with Annie Ortmeier to form the first all-female co-president tandem at a country label of significance. That development came, coincidentally, as women owned each of the top 5 slots on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs for what’s now stretched to five consecutive weeks. It’s the fifth time since 1980 that women have sewed up the top 5 on the list, but the first time that they’ve maintained the accomplishment past two weeks.
“I remember 10 years ago thinking that ‘with so many women in these executive roles, where are the women on the artist side?’” Ortmeier recalls. “Now, with Ella [Langley], who we represent from the radio side, and Megan [Moroney], and Taylor Swift making a comeback into country, and Lainey [Wilson] having blazed a trail, it feels like that’s catching up.”
Setting a precedent for women in Nashville’s female ranks isn’t a development that Braun saw coming. The former Montclair, N.J., resident relocated to Music City to study at Vanderbilt University in 1998 and was surprised at how quickly she adapted.
“I said I would come to a Southern school, but I would never listen to country music, ever, and I would never join a sorority,” Braun says. “I broke both of those within the first five months in Nashville.”
The quality of country’s songwriting won her over, and Braun immersed herself in the city’s club scene. After school, she spent nine years at CAA before transitioning into country radio promotion, first at Warner Music Nashville, then at Triple Tigers. In both companies, she reported to Herring.
“His mentoring is like nobody else,” Braun notes. “He guides with a steady hand, in terms of suggestions and motivation tactics, and he’s just very good with people. And I feel like he’s been my big brother for a long time.”
Braun’s promotion may break new gender-related ground, but it provides job-related continuity. When Herring and Ortmeier were selected to run the label’s daily operations as co-presidents by Triple Tigers managing partner George Couri, the move matched two executives with complementary backgrounds. Herring had history in radio programming as well as promotion, while Ortmeier had risen through cable TV and digital marketing. Though the staff could consult with either leader, their fields of expertise provided obvious structural hierarchy.
With Braun in place, Triple Tigers retains a promotion pro at the top of the management pyramid.
It’s a sign of “how important radio still is to Triple Tigers,” Ortmeier says. “From the outset of Kevin saying he was likely to step back, we knew immediately Rafi would step into his shoes.”
Braun didn’t know that. Herring and Couri dropped numerous hints, but it wasn’t until Herring revealed around the start of the year that he was planning to shift out of a day-to-day role that Braun understood what they had in mind for her.
Her promotion background was key, since radio has played a central role in Triple Tigers’ success since it was founded by Thirty Tigers, Sony Music’s company The Orchard and Couri’s Triple 8 Management as a joint venture 10 years ago. The label has, to date, released 26 singles to radio that have run through their peak positions; exactly half went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay, beginning with the inaugural Tigers single — Russell Dickerson’s “Yours” — while an additional four reached the top 10. That translates to 65% of the company’s radio releases making the top tier.
That ratio earned the company plenty of attention. Columbia’s New York division partnered on some country-focused titles — particularly Langley’s releases — and Triple Tigers rolled out a second promotion team, Akando Music, in June 2025. It currently represents Turnpike Troubadours, Tyler Nance and Black River singer Chris Young, in addition to the core Tigers roster: Dickerson, Scotty McCreery, Ian Munsick and Shane Profitt.
The company has some wiggle room to add another act or two while staying at the current boutique-level staff size of 14 employees. Meanwhile, Ortmeier and Braun — who have bonded in the nearly three years they’ve worked together at Triple Tigers — have some sifting of styles and duties to work through as they adjust to the executive revision. Their areas of expertise are fairly defined, and the employees’ specific relationships will be dictated with those skills in mind. But some of the smaller details have yet to be determined: Who will lead staff meetings? Will they fall into a classic good-cop/bad-cop set-up?
“I’d like to be the good cop if there’s a choice,” Braun riffs.
As much as the Triple Tigers move is a step forward in the executive suite — particularly in light of the concurrent female domination of the Hot Country Songs chart — Ortmeier and Braun would like to see the business evolve to the point that women’s accomplishments are less a sign of progress than simply an accepted state of being.
“Hopefully we continue to get past these ‘firsts’ for women in the industry, and it starts to be a regular occurrence, and we don’t have to call it out as being the first of its kind anymore,” Ortmeier says. “It can just be people are leading these companies, and it won’t be so much what the gender is. For most women, I think that’s what we’d like to get to.”
