This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Awards Business News Labels & Publishers Live Business Management & Funding
Billboard publishes Power 100
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 10 February 2017
US industry mag Billboard has published its annual Power 100 list, ranking the music industry figures it has arbitrarily decided are the most powerful in the music business.
Assuming your process for doing such a thing is to pick the biggest companies in music and declare the people atop those businesses the most powerful, then your first decision is whether to make Universal Music CEO Uncle Luci Grainge or Live Nation chiefster Michael Rapino top – they leading the biggest companies in recordings and live respectively. But wait to have your mind blown people, because Billboard has decided to put Spotify’s Daniel Ek in the top spot this year. Pow! Didn’t see that coming, did you?
Though the ‘line up the top execs at the biggest music firms’ approach is basically what Billboard does for its Power 100, something that demonstrates once again that the top level of the American music industry is still overwhelmingly white and male. In fact, you have to go all the way to number thirteen in the list to find a woman – Universal’s Michele Anthony – and she has to share her place with colleague Boyd Muir for some reason.
The first woman who gets a whole place in her own right is Universal Music Publishing boss Jody Gerson at number seventeen. Even applying Billboard’s own arguably flawed methodology, Gerson should almost certainly rank higher than that, though I suppose she does well just to secure her place as one of the whopping fifteen women to appear in the entire list. Yeah, fifteen. Well done, everyone.
Anywhere, here are the top ten men…
1. Daniel Ek, Spotify
2. Lucian Grainge, Universal Music Group
3. Michael Rapino, Live Nation Entertainment
4. Eddy Cue, Jimmy Iovine, Robert Kondrk, Apple
5. Rob Stringer, Columbia Records
6. Irving Azoff, Azoff MSG Entertainment
7. Marty Bandier, Sony/ATV Music Publishing
8. Stephen Cooper, Warner Music Group
9. Rob Light, Darryl Eaton, Mitch Rose & Rick Roskin, CAA
10. Doug Morris, Sony Music Entertainment
