Hipgnosis Songs Fund’s chief catalog officer Amy Thomson is stepping down from her position on the finish of September to market a customizable model of the catalog administration platform she constructed whereas on the firm.
Thomson has been the in-house professional managing the track catalogs acquired by the Merck Mercuriadis-founded fund since 2020, a interval that coincided with Hipgnosis’ game-changing rise within the publishing rights funding enterprise. She is going to stay a marketing consultant to the corporate after her departure.
She tells Billboard it was time to depart as a result of she completed the undertaking that introduced her to Hipgnosis: the creation of a platform that provides artists and their managers full and clear views of their portfolios, together with instruments to handle them. She says it took her and a crew of greater than a dozen two years to construct, and now that it’s completed, she is launching a made-to-measure model for different firms subsequent month.
Part one of many new platform, which isn’t but named, will launch in October with Abba founding member Björn Ulvaeus, together with a handful of different artists. Thomson says the service exhibits artists primarily “what they personal and easy methods to take care of it,” and can monitor deal summaries, contacts, track lists and assertion dates, and can embrace a calendar and full digitized assortment of an artist’s rights.
“After the work at Hipgnosis, which had custom-made components particularly designed for his or her wants, we’re tailoring the platform for artists and managers,” Thomson says, explaining that the subsequent part opening subsequent yr will contain customized builds for administration firms who symbolize a number of catalogs.
She provides, “Björn Ulvaeus would be the first take a look at case and we’ll watch and see how his portfolio of among the biggest songs ever written, films, theatre exhibits and enterprise portfolios look once we can see it multi function place.”
Thomson’s many years of expertise as founding father of the administration firm ATM Artists, and supervisor of such acts as Swedish Home Mafia, DJ Snake and Seal, have fueled an obsession with “attending to the underside of the path of the track as it’s used globally,” she says, asserting that monitoring the lifespan of a track, its earlier house owners and key dates buttresses the declare that songs are an asset class.
“Each single [song] is a enterprise, an asset,” she says. “With out realizing what you personal and easy methods to handle it, catalogs break and decay.”
Thomson will keep on as a marketing consultant to Hipgnosis, a job she stated will primarily contain lobbying on behalf of Hipgnosis, and she or he’ll proceed to sit down on the Board of Session for Ulvaeus. Session is Ulvaeus’s platform and app that tracks the creation and credit of data.
In a press release supplied to Billboard, Mercuriadis thanked Thomson for her “immense” contributions on the fund. “Her incomparable ardour and drive are second to none,” he stated. “She’s helped to form an thrilling firm and we’re all delighted that she is going to stay as a marketing consultant… I look ahead to championing her new endeavours.”
