It’s not everyday you get the opportunity to talk to a CEO of any company but we had the chance to pick the brain of the Harry Fox Agency CEO/President, Michael Simon.
If you don’t know, now you know, HFA is the nation’s leading provider of rights management, licensing and royalty services for the music industry. With over 48,000 music publishing clients, HFA issues the largest number of licenses for the use of music in both physical and digital distribution formats.
Mr. Simon also heads Slingshot, HFA’s rights management service, which is a comprehensive, end-to-end solution that is designed to streamline the licensing and royalty process, accelerate market entry and reduce administration cost for music distributors.
With all that on his plate, Michael still took the time answer a few of our questions. While he admitted that most of his days consists of thinking and executing ways to grow the business, talking numbers, or satisfying client’s business needs, in the end, Michael is a music guy that loves and appreciates the art of it.
Michael Simon may have started out as drummer (that is a great story we can share another day) but it is his business acumen and chops as a highly effective entertainment and music lawyer, astute music executive, and digital media executive that has propelled him through the music industry and to the top of HFA.
It was a pleasure speaking with the man in charge as he brilliantly, humorously, and humbly gave us a glimpse into the world of rights management, CEO life, and HFA’s place in the music industry.
TheIndustry.biz : Give us a little background about your self, your music industry experience, and how you ended up at HFA.
Michael Simon: Over the last 25 years I have been an entertainment lawyer, a music lawyer more specifically, a band manager, a member of a band, a digital media and music executive, and now for the last 13 years I have held various roles at HFA. That is very short version of what usually takes 2 hours.
TheIndustry.biz : Michael, what is the overall mission of HFA and what place do you hold in the market?
Michael Simon: From about 1926 until about 5 years ago, HFA’s exclusive business was the representation of music publi What I mean by that last point is record companies have copyright departments, they have people who are highly skilled and have been working in those departments for years and they understand the copyright act and how to get licenses either in bulk through me, or one by one through other avenues. But five people in a room in a Nordic country who get together through which they are going to distribute music, they didn’t get together to because they understand US copyright and they know how to build the best royalty database and they know how to render statements to publi
