Concord Recorded Music Expands Global Presence in Europe, Canada & Australia: Exclusive
Concord Recorded Music has expanded its international footprint by appointing staffers in Canada, Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom to market its frontline and catalog releases.
Concord Recorded Music has expanded its international footprint by appointing staffers in Canada, Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom to market its frontline and catalog releases.
New releases from Concord Recorded Music imprints Concord, Fantasy, Fearless, Loma Vista and Rounder, and catalog reissues from Craft Recordings will be handled by new label managers Andrew Hajgato in Melbourne, Bryan Columbus in Toronto and Hilke Dethleff in Berlin. The trio will report to Concord Recorded Music international senior vps Michael Nance and Rebecca Berman. They mark the first Concord-specific staffers the company has appointed in these territories.
In addition, David Beaufoy has been named senior director of catalog for Craft Recordings U.K., reporting to chief catalog executive Sig Sigworth and U.K. managing director Fred Gillham. Based in London, Beaufoy joins Gillham, whose July start coincided with Concord Record Music’s first international hub. Unlike the other three, Beaufoy will work specifically on catalog.
“Our aggressive approach to the market as one world makes us different from most other independent companies,” says Concord chief label executive Tom Whalley. “I get excited about how we can live up to the promise that we make to our artists on how we’re going to service their careers at a high level all around the world. They’re very independent minded artists. They don’t come here because they’re looking to get on pop radio. They want to forge their own path in the music world and find their audience wherever they can around the world. This sets us up to do this.”
Hajgato joins Concord following stops at Universal Music, Cooking Vinyl Australia and Inertia Music. Columbus was most recently a label and marketing manager for Black Box Music and BMG Canada, who has previous experience at Fontana North Distribution, Dine Alone Records and Bedland Music Management. Dethleff worked in artist relations at VH1/MTV, as well as was a senior marketing manager at Sony Music Entertainment. For the past 13 years, she has worked as a freelance product/label manager with clients including Concord, Kobalt and others. Beaufoy has already been working with Craft as a partner, says Sigworth, but now joins Craft full time to help manage the U.K. marketing of Craft’s catalog of 16,000 active albums.
Expect more expansion, especially in London, where Gillham has begun building out a full label presence. “The U.K. is an obvious market for us being English speaking and being such a huge market especially for U.S. repertoire,” Berman says. “We’ve identified it as the first place where we want to build out a model of having our own label presence beyond just a label manager. I think when we sign developing artists, the U.K. is your first test market for whether it’s going to work. Universal has been a great distribution partner for us, but in terms of our developing side, we really need to take control of our own artists and deliver them a story that we create ourselves.”
“The managers and artists really like the idea and can feel like they have a [Concord] home in these territories,” added Nance.
Similarly, on the catalog side, “we think our repertoire is highly American, but it crosses boundaries in terms of Creedence [Clearwater Revival] and some of the artists we have,” says Sigworth. Beaufoy will also work closely with U.K. based Independiente Records, which Concord acquired in 2018, and is home to such artists as Travis, Embrace and Paul Weller.
“Changes in marketplace and the digital world” provided the perfect opportunity for the expansion, Whalley says. “Universal does a great job distributing our music around the world and we get tremendous support from them, but the digital world allows us to be less reliant on them for marketing. The major view of how they want to go about their business is different enough from how we want to run ours so this was the right time.”
More From Pro
