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Michael S. Simon has been promoted to president and CEO for the Harry Fox Agency, succeeding Gary Churgin, who is leaving the company.
Simon, previously the organization’s senior VP of business affairs/ general counsel/chief strategic officer, has been with HFA since 2001, when he joined as head of the licensing division.
“Michael Simon has been a strong advocate to modernize HFA and move the company into new lines of business, progressively overseeing more of HFA and proving himself a leader and visionary within the organization,” HFA chairman of the board and National Music Publishers Assn. chairman Irwin Z. Robinson said in a statement. “I know that Michael will continue to expand HFA’s position as the foremost rights licensing partner in the U.S. as well as strengthen the focus on customer service for publishers and licensees.”
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Robinson said the board was grateful to Churgin for leading HFA through its technology transformation “while also navigating some of the most radical changes to music licensing in the past fifty years.”
In a statement, Simon said he is committed to working to aggressively grow HFA’s Slingshot services, which is a suite of information management and technology solutions that include end-to-end back-office support for database management, licensing, royalty calculation, collection, distribution, and reporting.
“With our Slingshot service, which simplifies the licensing and royalty payment process for clients, we are delivering HFA’s expanded rights management expertise to all music distributors and music publishers,” Simon said. “I am also committed to supporting HFA’s current music publishing and licensee base and delivering to them the support they need to run their businesses most effectively.”
Prior to joining HFA, Simon was executive VP of business affairs and general council for Razorfish, Inc. where he helped guide them from a small private organization of 18 people into a public company of over 2,000 employees and several hundred million dollars in revenues and oversaw 18 acquisitions worth nearly $1 billion.
Before Razorfish, he founded Simon Ventures, an artist management and consulting company, and before that he was senior director of legal affairs at Polygram Records. He also served as an associate in the entertainment and intellectual property law practice of Levine Thall Plotkin & Menin as well as in the corporate, litigation and entertainment practice of Rubin Baum Levin Constant & Friedman. Simon graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College and received his Juris Doctor from the Columbia University School of Law, according to the announcement.
