Thomas Hesse

Thomas Hesse is President of Sony BMG Music Entertainment's Global Digital Business and US Sales. He reports directly to Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, Chief Executive Officer for Sony BMG Music Entertainment. He is based in New York City.

Hesse was appointed to the position of President in charge of Global Digital Business upon the completion of the SONY BMG merger in 2004. Since the beginning of 2007 he was also put in charge of SONY BMG's physical sales activities in the US, including CDs and DVDs. He is responsible for Sony BMG's worldwide revenues from digital exploitation via online and mobile media, as well as for New Technology and New Business Development. Hesse joined BMG in New York to serve as Chief Strategic Officer in 2002. In that role he was driving BMG's merger with Sony Music and was also responsible for Digital Business Development and New Technology. Prior to joining BMG, Hesse was Executive Vice President and Head of Corporate Strategy at Bertelsmann AG, and previously held a number of executive positions at the company's television division RTL. During his six years in television, Hesse was Secretary General of RTL Television, Germany, in charge of Program Acquisition and Distribution, and CEO of RTL NEW MEDIA. Hesse began his career in media and entertainment as a corporate consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he focused on Media and Corporate Finance.

Hesse holds a BA and MA from Oxford University, an MSc from the London School of Economics and a Doctorate in Corporate Finance from the University of St. Gallen. He studied as a concert pianist at the "Mozarteum" in Salzburg and the "Hochschule für Musik" in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Since joining SONY BMG, Hesse has led the company's Global Digital Business division, developing initiatives across a variety of platforms and channels, ranging from Internet downloads and subscriptions to mobile ringtones, full-length mobile downloads, and videos.

In April of 2008 SONY BMG joined other major music companies in forming MySpace Music, a joint venture that will serve as an interactive online platform for music sales, subscription services and ad-supported entertainment. On April 4th of 2008, The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Hesse as saying of the deal that "...the exciting part of this is that it marries the social networking of MySpace with access to the music. It creates a new kind of destination at your fingertips, with all of the content and the social interaction that keeps it fresh."

Later in April of 2008 the company announced that it had joined Nokia's "Comes With Music," which involves mobile phones bundled with access to music, enabling users to download and listen to as many songs as they like. On April 22 the Associated Press quoted Hesse as saying, "When you give consumers the key to the candy store without any limitations, there's a lot more opportunity for discovering music that you might not have found before. We think this will energize the discovery of music."

Hesse also led company on its first forays into DRM-free music, and in January of 2008 he announced in USA Today SONY BMG's intention to sell unprotected digital music gift cards, saying "The bigger picture is to make our music available in many different formats, through many different channels, in many different ways." [ [http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/money/20080107/1b_music07.art.htm Sony BMG trades plastic cards for downloaded tunes] ] Several days later, on January 11th, he unveiled the second part of the company's DRM-free initiative, announcing that the company would join Amazon's DRM-free store, telling USA Today that the "newest element of our ongoing campaign to bring our music to fans wherever they happen to be." [ [http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2008-01-10-sony-amazon-music-downloads_N.htm Sony BMG deal gives Amazon an advantage] ]

Hesse presented these initiatives as part of a more general approach to making music available across multiple formats and business models. On January 19th, 2008 he told Billboard Magazine, the music industry trade publication, that the company was "moving from a single-product world where we sold the CD at stores to a multi-product, multi-income stream environment in both the physical and digital space."

In the fall of 2006, while speaking at The Digital Music Forum West, he predicted strong growth in the digital segment, noting that digital sales and service accounted for around 20 percent of the company's digital music division (at that time), and forecasting that "That percentage should rise "significantly." [ [http://www.techweb.com/headlines_week/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=193104912 Digital Music Revenues Set To Soar, Says Sony BMG] ] Subsequent events bore out his predictions and, in January of 2008, when Hesse spoke at Midem in Cannes, the New York Post quoted him as saying that he "expected digital sales in the US to account for half of its revenue...in 2009," and that "digital accounted for almost a third of Sony BMG's US revenue {the previous year}" [ [http://www.nypost.com/seven/01282008/business/business_briefs_141314.htm New York Post Business Briefs] ]

Hesse came under fire from consumer rights advocates for comments he made in a piece that aired on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, November 4, 2005 . [ [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989260 NPR: Sony Music CDs Under Fire from Privacy Advocates ] ] While being questioned about Sony's controversial use of a rootkit that acts as spyware and malware that led to the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal, installed when a user listens to a Sony BMG CD on a computer, Hesse said, "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"

Notes

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External links

* [http://blog.sonymusic.com/sonybmg/archives/007020.html THOMAS HESSE NAMED PRESIDENT, GLOBAL DIGITAL BUSINESS, SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT]
* [http://press.sonybmg.com/2007/01/10/thomas-hesse-president-global-digital-business-sony-bmg-music-entertainment/ Thomas Hesse Adds Responsibility For U.S. Sales To Existing Role as President, Global Digital Business, SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT]