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Scott Cohen moves to futurist role at Warner Music

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 7 March 2019

Having departed The Orchard last month, Scott Cohen has confirmed he is heading to Warner’s recorded music business where he will take up the new role of Chief Innovation Officer. His job will be to point the mini-major towards new tech trends.

In a statement, Warner’s recorded music CEO Max Lousada says: “Scott spots and champions emerging technology with the same level of passion, creativity and ambition that our A&Rs bring to artist development. A valuable addition to our senior team, he’ll be an amazing brand ambassador and thought-leader, who joins a great lineage of maverick entrepreneurs at the independent major”.

Cohen himself adds: “It’s no longer enough for entertainment companies to merely embrace change, they need to create the future themselves. What attracted me to Warner was the sense that Max and his team are building an environment where truly original, disruptive ideas can flourish. Warner is uniquely positioned to take an agile but principled approach to growing the universe of opportunity for music”.

See, I think this is probably a cool job, but both of those quotes prove it’s quite hard to talk about stuff like this without it sounding like nonsense.

But whatever. Cohen, of course, co-founded The Orchard in 1997, developing it into one of the earliest and most successful digital distributors, which subsequently became the label services division of Sony Music. So he does have form in this innovation sort of thing.

He’s also the co-founder of CyborgNest, which I think is something to do with humans implanting technology into their bodies. So he does scary innovation too.