Dear Music Ally Reader,
We’d like to share some happy news with you, about how Music Ally’s team and our business is evolving.
We’re delighted to announce that Patrick Ross, formerly our VP of digital strategy, is now Music Ally’s chief operating officer (COO). He’ll be overseeing our development into a global leader in knowledge and skills for the modern music business.
Patrick joined Music Ally three and a half years ago from AWAL / Kobalt, and he’ll be working with closely with Kushal Patel and Marlen Huellbrock, our newly-promoted head of training and head of marketing respectively, to build some marvellous things that we’re looking forward to announcing soon…
We’re also pleased as punch to appoint Joe Sparrow as the new editor of Music Ally, taking a central role on the publishing side of our business, including podcasts, video and our recently-launched weekly newsletter The Knowledge.
Don’t worry: we haven’t kicked out his predecessor as editor. Stuart Dredge is now our head of insight, developing new ways for us to publish and share our knowledge. He will (sadly for his prospects of morning lie-ins!) continue to write our daily news bulletin.
To be British about this for a second, we are chuffed to bits with our team, which has reshaped and grown over this incredibly strange and challenging last 18 months.
Back in April 2019, when Covid-19 was just a glint in a random bat’s eye (*Stuart, Joe, please check the science on this…) we published an article about ourselves called What We Do and Where We’re Going. It talked about how we were expanding our business with training, events and working directly with labels and artists.
All of that continues: we’ve been running events online, building our Learn catalogue of training modules, and putting our theories into practice with some brilliant musicians and rightsholders.
Music Ally Japan and Music Ally China are thriving, and we recently launched a joint venture with iManage Africa called the Music Business Academy for Africa, providing vocational education for aspiring creative entrepreneurs across that continent.
In 2020 we also ran our Creative Entrepreneur Programme in partnership with UK charity Youth Music, to help people from disadvantaged backgrounds learn how to build a career in the music industry.
That process taught us a lot about the challenges people face when trying to get into this business, whether as musicians or entrepreneurs, and we’re committed to helping more people to overcome those barriers.
With that in mind, along with our wider social and environmental concerns, we are changing our company structure to become a certified B Corp. That means we will be audited every year to make sure we are building a more socially conscious and environmentally sustainable business, rather than simply growing commercially.
We’re really excited about this process, and about continuing to serve our community drawn from all corners of the music industry: labels, publishers, managers, artists, collecting societies, digital music services, startups and more. Thanks for staying with us, and we can’t wait to show you what’s next.
Music Ally co-founders Paul Brindley (CEO) and Steve Mayall (MD)
Music Ally’s next Learn Live webinar will help you understand what’s required for artists to thrive in new international markets!