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Downtown combines its services businesses into one division
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 23 September 2022
Downtown Music Holdings has announced another rejig that will bring together a number of its businesses into a new global division to be called Downtown Music headed up by the boss of one of those businesses, Pieter Van Rijn from music distributor FUGA.
The new division will consist of FUGA – which Downtown acquired back in 2020 – as well as the group’s rights management platform AdRev and its neighbouring rights agency, plus Downtown Music Services. The latter was created in April last year after Downtown sold its songs catalogue to Concord, but retained its music publishing admin services business, which it allied with its existing label services set-up under the Downtown Music Services banner.
Says Downtown CEO Andrew Bergman: “Downtown is committed to placing the tools of the trade in the hands of those who create the art that we all depend on. Downtown’s new structure offers the most nimble, flexible end-to-end service offering available in the music industry”.
“As we continue to position Downtown as the global leader in music services, this new structure will help us to further empower our artist, label and creator partners around the world”, he goes on. “Under Pieter’s leadership, FUGA became the industry leading service provider of services that rights owners need to be successful in the modern music industry and we’re excited for him to bring his vision and energy to this newly integrated division of the company”.
Van Rijn himself adds: “It is such an exciting time to be at Downtown as we shape our offerings into the most potent and strategic music services company in the business today. What we have built and developed at FUGA has grown into the leading partner for independent music companies for distribution, technology, marketing services, analytics and royalty accounting. We’ve added new services in neighbouring rights and audience engagement”.
“Being able to bring that experience to the broader offering of business services to all of Downtown is a challenge I am truly energised about”, he continues. “Looking at new markets for us to continue to grow such as Asia, Latin America, Africa and specific parts of Europe are also tremendous opportunities we are focused on group-wide”.
The wider Downtown group also operates the DIY distributor CD Baby and song rights admin platform SongTrust, among other things.
