Miley Cyrus Closes the Book on Sony, Opens a New One at Atlantic

Miley Cyrus has left the only music home she’s known for over a decade, signing with Atlantic Records after two albums and a live release on Columbia.

Representatives confirmed the signing to Billboard, and the trade quickly had company. Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and Rolling Stone all landed their own confirmations within hours of each other, the kind of simultaneous scramble that tends to happen only when a story this size is already an open secret in the building. Cyrus is now an Atlantic Records artist, full stop, and the paperwork ends a run at Columbia Records that produced some of the biggest commercial moments of her career.

A Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony marked a milestone as Miley posed beside the newly unveiled star on the iconic boulevard. Dressed in a black lace gown on the red carpet, the moment celebrated a career spanning music, film, and popular culture.

That Columbia chapter, which began in 2021, gave the world 2022’s live album “Attention: Miley Live,” then 2023’s “Endless Summer Vacation,” and 2025’s “Something Beautiful.” The middle release is the one that changed the shape of her year: “Flowers” spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and walked away with two Grammys, record of the year and best pop solo performance, her first-ever wins at the ceremony.

Captured during a Grammy Awards acceptance speech, Miley addresses the audience while holding the iconic gramophone trophy. The moment reflects another milestone in a career recognized across pop music, performance, and songwriting.

Eight weeks at No. 1 is a long stay by any current standard, long enough that “Flowers” became one of the defining chart stories of 2023 rather than a passing hit. It’s the kind of run that changes how a label values an artist going into a renegotiation, and industry reporting has already frame the Atlantic deal as a direct result of that momentum. A song released on one label doesn’t typically decide where an artist signs next on its own, but a song that dominates the Hot 100 for two months and closes out with a Grammy sweep tends to reset expectations for everyone involved, the artist included.

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Cyrus’s connection with Sony Music runs deeper than one label. She signed to RCA Records in 2013, the deal that followed her split from Disney’s Hollywood Records, and stayed there for roughly seven years. RCA is where “Bangerz” happened, where “Wrecking Ball” hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 in 2013, and where the stranger, more experimental turns of her catalog, including “Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz,” found a home. “Younger Now” and “Plastic Hearts” rounded out that stretch before she moved to Columbia, another arm of the same Sony Music umbrella, in 2021.

So the jump to Atlantic isn’t just a label change. It’s Cyrus’s first move outside Sony’s orbit since she was twelve years old and auditioning for a Disney Channel show about a girl with a wig and a secret. Before RCA, before Columbia, there was Hollywood Records and “Meet Miley Cyrus” in 2007, the record that turned a TV tie-in into an actual pop career. Counting Atlantic, this is her fourth label home, and her first with Warner Music Group rather than Sony.

It’s worth sitting with how long that Sony relationship actually was. From “Meet Miley Cyrus” in 2007 through “Something Beautiful” in 2025, nearly two decades of her recorded output, spanning Disney tie-ins, a divisive VMA performance, a psych-rock detour, a full return to pop, and a Grammy-winning victory lap, all sat under one corporate parent, even as the specific imprint changed twice along the way. Artists rarely stay inside one company’s orbit for that long, and the fact that Cyrus did says something about how much continuity mattered to her camp even as her sound kept shifting underneath it.

The entrance to Sony’s flagship building features a monumental stone arch with an intricately detailed coffered ceiling viewed from below. Classical architectural elements frame the bold SONY signage, blending historic design with the company’s modern retail presence.

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The signing reportedly came together with Atlantic CEO Elliot Grainge and EVP and co-head of pop A&R Brandon Davis leading the charge on the label side. Grainge has been building a specific kind of momentum since taking over the company, and industry reporting has tied this deal to some of his other recent signings, including Clairo and Hilary Duff. On Cyrus’s side, Crush Management continues to handle her career, with her mother, Tish Cyrus-Purcell, described in multiple reports as jure an active role in getting the deal across the line.

None of the outlets that broke the news have published contract terms, album commitments, or a release date for new material, and this piece isn’t going to guess at numbers that haven’t been made public. What has surfaced is more textural: reports of a new single and album already taking shape, with convincers including Kid Harpoon, Maxx Morando, and Michael Pollack circling the sessions. Those names haven’t been confirmed by Cyrus or Atlantic directly, so treat them as reported rather than announced.

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Atlantic’s current artist roster is part of why this signing landed as a bigger story than a typical label swap. The company counts Bruno Mars, Charli XCX, Cardi B, and Kehlani among its artists, along with a much longer list that spans pop, hip hop, and rock. Cyrus slots into a label built around exactly the kind of genre-crossing instinct that’s defined her own catalog, from a Disney Channel theme song to a stripped-down NBC live album to a full-blown disco-pop resurrection with “Flowers.”

The label itself has a longer history than most of its current roster. Atlantic Records was founded in 1947 and built its early identity on jazz, blues, and soul, eventually becoming the home of artists like Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles before expanding into rock with acts like Led Zeppelin in the decades that followed. That’s the kind of institutional weight a label likes to point to when closing a deal with an artist whose own career has already run through nearly every corner of pop music. Whether that history factored into Cyrus’s decision hasn’t been addressed publicly by either side, but it’s part of the context any signing at Atlantic now carries.

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Cyrus’s arrival at Atlantic comes only months after the label parted ways with one of its longest-running and biggest names. Ed Sheeran, who spent years as one of the anchor acts across the Warner Music Group roster, has moved to Interscope Records under Universal Music Group, a switch first reported by the Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. It’s an odd bit of symmetry: one artist leaves Atlantic’s parent company for a rival, and another arrives from that same rival’s biggest competitor, all inside the same calendar year. Neither move has been publicly tied to the other by either label, and there’s no indication the two are connected beyond timing.

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The label news arrives in the middle of what’s already been a packed stretch for Cyrus. In May, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with Anya Taylor-Joy and Donatella Versace both speaking at the ceremony. In March, she marked the 20th anniversary of “Hannah Montana” with a premiere held at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, a full two decades removed from the show that first put her in front of a camera.

Most recently, Cyrus guest-edited a new issue of Wonderland magazine, working closely with the publication’s chief creative officer, Alastair McKimm. The issue went on sale in stores this week and brings together a cross-gen group of people Cyrus has described as shaping her personal and creative life, among them Dolly Parton, Daryl Hannah, her mother Tish Cyrus-Purcell, her sister Noah Cyrus, Kelela, Lykke Li, Sky Ferreira, 070 Shake, Towa Bird, Suzanne Vega, Tallulah Willis, Scout Willis, and Phantogram.

Speaking with the magazine about songwriting, Cyrus described the process as something closer to instinct than mechanics, a feeling that arrives rather than one she constructs from scratch. She’s talked in similar terms before, but the timing here, landing in the same week as a label change reported by multiple major trades, reads less like coincidence and more like a coordinated turn of the page. A new label deal and a guest-edited magazine issue full of formative influences make a fairly clear statement about where an artist sees herself heading next, even without a single official lyric to back it up yet.

The Wonderland issue also touched on acting, an area Cyrus has largely stepped back from in recent years outside of scattered cameo appearances. She’s said she’d genuinely like to return to the screen and described wanting to disappear into something romantic, language that suggests a mood rather than a confirmed project. Nothing about a film or television role has been announced, and the comment reads more as a stated interest than an in-progress plan, but paired with a new record deal, it fills out a picture of an artist actively mapping out what her next several years might look like across more than one medium.

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There’s no confirmed release date, no title, and no tracklist attached to whatever comes out of Cyrus’s new deal with Atlantic. What exists right now is a signing, a short list of reported convincers, and a fairly clean break from the only corporate family she’s had since she was a preteen. Her chart history gives some sense of what a label is betting on: thirteen top 10 hits on the Hot 100 across her career, two of them reaching No. 1 in “Wrecking Ball” and “Flowers,” along with five additional entries in the top five. Those numbers, plus a Grammy-winning 2023 that turned “Flowers” into one of the defining pop songs of the decade, make it easy to understand why a label run by Elliot Grainge would want her name on a contract.

What she does with the deal is still an open question, and reporting so far has stayed appropriately careful about not overpromising a sound or a timeline that hasn’t been confirmed by Cyrus or Atlantic themselves.

Label switches at this level of the industry rarely happen quietly, and rarely happen for just one reason. Contracts expire, momentum peaks, executives change, and artists reassess who’s best positioned to support the next stretch of their careers, sometimes all at once. Cyrus’s case has elements of all of it: a Columbia deal that ran its course after two albums and a live record, a chart run on “Flowers” big enough to shift her market value, and a new label boss in Elliot Grainge who’s been actively building out Atlantic’s pop wing with names like Clairo and Hilary Duff already in the fold. None of that guarantees what her tenth studio album will sound like, but it does explain, in fairly ordinary business terms, why this particular deal happened now rather than at some other point in her career.

There’s also the matter of family involvement, which several outlets have noted without much elaboration. Tish Cyrus-Purcell’s reported role in negotiating the deal fits a pattern that’s become more common across the industry, where parents and longtime managers stay closely involved in contract negotiations well past an artist’s early years. For Cyrus, whose entire career began as a family project built around a Disney show, that continuity from childhood stardom through her latest label deal is its own kind of through, even if the sound of her music has changed almost beyond recognition since 2006.