Now she’s using her marketing smarts to bring the company into the digital age. She was one of the first in the music business to realize that you have to figure out new ways to get the music out there and make money from it. So she sold the rights of the music of Atlantic acts like Jet for ring tones to companies like Sprint and worked with Sprint to market the acts. Atlantic then took a cut in the tours and merchandising that followed.

She now calls My Space, AOL and Yahoo “our online partners.” And even though she craves more time with her family than her 16-hour days allow, she hasn’t forgotten her roots. While her father was recuperating from the car accident that took her mother’s life, she put him in her Manhattan home and made her bedroom and bathroom wheelchair accessible. When her sister in Arkansas teaches disadvantaged kids, Julie sends them all sorts of albums and T-shirts and offers critiques of their amateur raps.

She flew her sister’s kids to the Super Bowl in Miami, let them sit in on private meetings at Diddy’s mansion and got them backstage passes before flying them up to New York to see a Broadway show. For Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, she returns to the little white synagogue in Wurtsboro. For Thanksgiving, she roasts a turkey in her Tribeca loft and worries that she’s making the family’s mushy carrot specialty just right.

“You wouldn’t know who she was unless you know who she was,” says father Dennis, over lunch in Danny’s in Wurtsboro, just a few blocks from where little Julie went sleigh riding. Only now, big Julie is featured in magazines like Billboard, Newsweek and Crain’s that are spread out in front of proud dad’s tuna sandwich. Today, Atlantic is No. 3 in the music industry.