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Q Prime, founded 1982

"I wanted to be unambiguously on somebody’s side, and the side I would choose to be on was the artist’s side. And I could only do that by being a manager.” – Cliff Burnstein, Q Prime

Forty-three years after beginning the adventure in rock ‘n’ roll management that is Q Prime, the legendary music management partnership of Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch remains innovative and successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. A multi-city and dual-country firm headquartered in New York, with offices in Los Angeles, London and Nashville, Q Prime works with top-tier, integrity-driven artists across different genres. The duo earned the trust of countless world-class musicians, and Q Prime has often stepped in where record companies faltered.

Full-service, Q Prime provide artist-owned labels for Metallica, Disturbed, Silversun Pickups, Brett Eldredge, and Declan McKenna. In addition to Q Prime South, opened by John Peets in 2001, the firm added more value to its roster in 2023 with the Nashville-based Aaron Frank Team joining the Q Prime family, bringing a roster that includes Greta Van Fleet, and St. Paul and the Broken Bones.

Q Prime has been integral in manifesting cultural milestones for its artists. 2019 saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers play in front of Egypt's Great Pyramids of Giza to more than 10,000 people on site and many more via livestream. Core Q Prime artists Metallica crossed over to Gen Z thanks to "Master of Puppets’" prominent appearance in the 2022 season four finale of Stranger Things. “Master of Puppets,” initially released in 1986, surged to number one on streaming platforms. Fan and critical favorites Cage the Elephant earned the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album twice, first in 2017 for Tell Me I'm Pretty and in 2020 for Social Cues. The indie rock Kentuckians were chosen for all stops of the North American leg of the Oasis Live '25 reunion tour, while their 2024 album Neon Pill was nominated for Best Alternative Music Performance at the 2025 Grammys. And on the heels of the firm’s marquee artists are buzzy UK baroque-pop band The Last Dinner Party, who Q Prime signed in 2021, soon after the group’s first gig. The genre-breaking band won the Rising Star prize at the BRIT Awards 2024, as well as the BBC Sound of... prize that year. In 2025 the Last Dinner Party earned Best New Artist accolades at the BRITs.  

Respect, ambition, creativity and a fearless work ethic are among the qualities Q Prime has, and seeks in its creators. “We want acts who are ambitious, who want to be the biggest they can be — or think they have an upside — and that are mostly willing to listen to our advice. If they’re not, what’s the point?” Peter says.  

The duo’s friendship that evolved into Q Prime began as a meeting of like minds five decades ago. In 1973, Burnstein, just short of completing his doctoral thesis in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania, veered left and applied to record companies. Landing in Mercury Records’ Chicago office, Cliff went from the finance department to radio promotion. In that position he crossed paths with Peter Mensch, Music Director of Brandeis University’s radio station. A cold call to promote Bachman Turner Overdrive, Thin Lizzy and The New York Dolls led to a conversation that’s lasted 51 years. With simpatico musical tastes and a shared drive and integrity, a lifelong friendship and burgeoning partnership was born.

After Peter completed a Marketing degree at the University of Chicago, Cliff hired Peter to work at the new NYC-based punk label he’d convinced Mercury Records to back, Blank Records, the label signing Cleveland’s influential Pere Ubu. From there, Peter took a gig with Aerosmith’s management, Leber-Krebs. A tour accounting position found him on the road with Aerosmith, where Peter met opening band AC/DC, who he soon began to manage.

Meanwhile, Cliff moved into A&R at Mercury, where he signed Rush to their American deal. Cliff went after the Scorpions and Def Leppard for the label, and both signed with Leber-Krebs. Cliff was finding life at Mercury difficult, the company dropping the ball on Rush. Cliff recalls, “When you’re at a label, you’re torn. You go out and sign a band you think are the greatest, you find a producer and choose the songs, do the sequencing and get the artwork and all that done. And then the head of marketing says, “We don’t have room to promote that this year.”

In 1980, Cliff left Mercury to join Peter at Leber-Krebs and to be “on the side of the angels.” Together, the duo was set to rule the hard rock/metal landscape with AC/DC, managing the band during its Back in Black era, the best-selling hard rock record in history. Scorpions, the Michael Schenker Group and Def Leppard also joined the Leber-Krebs roster. Within a couple years, Peter and Cliff formed Q Prime Management with Def Leppard as their marquee act.

“On April 1, 1982, we opened the doors of Q Prime Management. By ‘doors’ I mean my apartment in New York and Peter’s apartment in London,” recalls Cliff. “There were no employees, just two guys working out of two apartments separated by 3000 miles of water.”  

Def Leppard’s second album, High & Dry, got a boost thanks to the band’s anthemic songs and MTV videos; Leppard’s third album, Pyromania, became a bonafide smash, selling over 10 million copies in the US. A year after the company’s inception, Q Prime had their first hit band

Cliff, with his ear to the ground, caught wind of a West Coast band by the name of Metallica. Shortly thereafter, in England, Cliff and Peter were browsing London’s hard rock record store, Shades, when they saw multiple kids with homemade Metallica patches on their jackets. Metallica already had a deal with indie label Megaforce, who were about to release Ride the Lightning, but the band was unhappy with their management. Not long after meeting Metallica, Q Prime took over management, and concurrently, Elektra signed the foursome to their major label deal. The following year, the result of this partnership was Master of Puppets, which has become one of the most influential heavy music records of all time, and the first heavy metal album added to the Library of Congress. Thanks to Q Prime’s guidance, the band gained control of their master recordings in 2012, and the firm helped broker a deal for the band to purchase the Furnace Record Vinyl Pressing Plant. Metallica remain with Q Prime to this day, in a show of loyalty almost unheard of in the music business.    

Like the artists on its roster, Q Prime is constantly growing and adapting to demands. Yet they remain a very DIY company. “We do things ourselves. We have 40 employees. We’re basically a record company now in North America,” Peter explains. “We have a digital department. We have a marketing department. When we shuffle off this mortal coil, we want people to go, ‘They were fucking legends.’ I want to prove myself every fucking day.”  

That ethos has seen Q Prime “doing the heavy lifting” for numerous high-profile musical ventures around the world. In addition to organizing the Led Zeppelin reunion concert at London’s 02 Arena in 2007, Cliff and Peter helped Jimmy Page negotiate with Warner Music Group to release the Mothership Greatest Hits album, as well as the 2012 release of Celebration Day, the acclaimed concert film of the London reunion show. Q Prime were also creative consultants for the Rolling Stones' massive Steel Wheels Tour in 1989–1990.

Additionally, and crucially, all at Q Prime remain music obsessives, and relish the chance to work with artists they’ve been long time fans of. To wit, in 2024, Q Prime struck a label services and distribution deal with British hitmakers The Zombies. Q Prime is managing all aspects of marketing, manufacturing, distribution and licensing for The Zombies’ new label imprint Beechwood Park Records. “There’s a very narrow window in a Venn diagram where love, admiration and business overlap,” concluded Cliff. “That’s what the deal is all about.”

 

Q Prime Roster  

Asinhell, Cage The Elephant, Annie DiRusso, Disturbed, Dogstar Metallica, Lydia Night  Pantera, David Rawlings, Silversun Pickups, Three Days Grace, Volbeat, Gillian Welch,  

QP UK: Declan McKenna, Foals, The Last Dinner Party, Nell Mescal, Yannis & The Yaw

QP South: Brothers Osborne, Eric Church, Brett Eldredge,  Ashley McBryde, Harper O’Neill, Marty Stuart

QP AF: All Them Witches, Dashboard Confessional, Greta Van Fleet, Matt Maeson, St. Paul, St. Paul & The Broken Bones; as well as Richy Mitch & The Coal Miners and Jesse Welles (co-managed with Beau Boggs)

QPrime – Past: Baroness, Def Leppard, Dokken, Fountains of Wayne, Garbage, Hole, Jimmy Page, Josh Groban, Led Zeppelin (Reunion Show), Muse, Queensrÿche, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Screaming Trees, Shania Twain, Smashing Pumpkins, Snow Patrol, Suicidal Tendencies, Tesla, The Black Keys, Veruca Salt