Nicholas Louis Douglas Firth (born October 1942 [1] ) is the former head of Chappell & Co. and BMG Music Publishing.
Nicholas Louis Douglas Firth (born October 1942 [1] ) is the former head of Chappell & Co. and BMG Music Publishing.
Firth's career in music publishing began in 1962, where he worked for the Chappell Group, then a division of PolyGram BV, culminating with simultaneous positions as President of Chappell International and Vice President of the PolyGram Publishing Division, which he held from 1981 to 1985, when PolyGram sold Chappell. Subsequently, Mr. Firth was a shareholder and CEO of Music Theatre International. Mr. Firth was later Chairman and CEO of BMG Music Publishing, the largest independent music publisher in the world and the third largest music publisher among all publishers. BMG was sold to Universal Music Publishing Group in 2007.
His grandfather Louis Dreyfus and great uncle Max Dreyfus owned Chappell & Company in New York City and London.
Nicholas Firth serves on the Boards of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), the International Music Publishers Association (IMPA), the Third Street Music School Settlement, and the Mannes College of Music.
Nick serves as Chairman of the Advisory Board of musiXmatch.
Firth was born in London, England, grew up in the United States of America, and then returned to the UK, where he got his first publishing job.
Nicholas Firth was married to his second wife, Edmée, née de Montmollin for 31 years until her death. [2] His first marriage ended in divorce. He lives in Bedford New York.
Island Records is a Jamaican multinational record label owned by Universal Music Group. It was founded in 1959 by Chris Blackwell, Graeme Goodall, and Leslie Kong in Jamaica, and was eventually sold to PolyGram in 1989. Island and A&M Records, another label recently acquired by PolyGram, were both at the time the largest independent record labels in history, with Island having exerted a major influence on the progressive music scene in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. Island Records operates four international divisions: Island US, Island UK, Island Australia, and Island France. Current key people include Island US president Darcus Beese, and MD Jon Turner. Partially due to its significant legacy, Island remains one of UMG's pre-eminent record labels.
A record label, or record company, or simply records, is a brand or trademark of music recordings and music videos, or the company that owns it. Sometimes, a record label is also a publishing company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the production, manufacture, distribution, marketing, promotion, and enforcement of copyright for sound recordings and music videos, while also conducting talent scouting and development of new artists, and maintaining contracts with recording artists and their managers. The term "record label" derives from the circular label in the center of a vinyl record which prominently displays the manufacturer's name, along with other information.
Monument Records is an American record label in Washington, D.C. named for the Washington Monument, founded in 1958 by Fred Foster, Buddy Deane, and business manager Jack Kirby. Buddy Deane soon left the company, and in the early '60s bought KOTN in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where he lived in retirement until his death. Foster and Kirby relocated to the Nashville suburb of Hendersonville, Tennessee. Monument's releases include a variety of genres including rock and roll, country, jazz, and rhythm and blues.
Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) was a division of a German media company Bertelsmann before its completion of sale of the majority of its assets to Sony Corporation of America on 1 October 2008. Although it was established in 1987, the music company was formed as RCA/Ariola International in 1985 as a joint venture to combine the music label activities of RCA's RCA Records division and Bertelsmann's Ariola Records and its associated labels which include Arista Records. It consisted of the BMG Music Publishing company, the world's third largest music publisher and the world's largest independent music publisher and the 50% share of the joint venture with Sony Music, which established the German American Sony BMG from 2004 to 2008.
PolyGram N.V. was a multinational entertainment company and major music record label formerly based in the Netherlands. It was founded in 1962 as the Grammophon-Philips Group by Dutch corporation Philips and German corporation Siemens, to be a holding for their record companies, and was renamed "PolyGram" in 1972. The name was chosen to reflect the Siemens interest Polydor Records and the Philips interest Phonogram Records. The company traced its origins through Deutsche Grammophon back to the inventor of the flat disc gramophone, Emil Berliner.
Warner Music Group Corp. is an American multinational entertainment and record label conglomerate headquartered in New York City. It is one of the "big three" recording companies and the third-largest in the global music industry, after Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony Music Entertainment (SME). Formerly part of Time Warner, WMG was publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange from 2005 until 2011, when it announced its privatization and sale to Access Industries. It later had its second IPO on Nasdaq in 2020, once again becoming a public company. With a multibillion-dollar annual turnover, WMG employs more than 3,500 people and has operations in more than 50 countries throughout the world.
PolyGram Filmed Entertainment was a film production company founded in 1975 as an American film studio, which became a European competitor to Hollywood within two decades, but was eventually sold to Seagram Company Ltd. in 1998 and was folded two years later. Among its most successful and well known films were The Deep (1977), Midnight Express (1978), An American Werewolf in London (1981), Flashdance (1983), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Dead Man Walking (1995), The Big Lebowski (1998), Fargo (1996), The Usual Suspects (1995), The Game (1997), Barney's Great Adventure (1998) and Notting Hill (1999).
Carlin America is an American music publisher with a catalog of over 100,000 titles. The company, created under its current name in 1995 by its founder Freddy Bienstock, is headquartered on East 38th Street in Manhattan. Bienstock died on September 29, 2009, after which Carlin Music was run by his children Robert and Caroline.
Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) is a global music publishing company and is part of the Universal Music Group. Universal Music Publishing has been ranked the #1 music publisher in market share by Billboard for multiple consecutive quarters.
Sony Music Publishing is the largest music publisher in the world, with over five million songs owned or administered as of end March 2021. US-based, it is part of the Sony Music Group, which is itself owned by Sony Entertainment. The company was formed as Sony/ATV in 1995 by the merger of the original incarnation of Sony Music Publishing and ATV Music, which was owned by late entertainer Michael Jackson. Jackson had purchased ATV Music, which included the Lennon–McCartney song catalog, in 1985.
Freddy Bienstock was an American music publisher who built his career in music by being the person responsible for soliciting and selecting songs for Elvis Presley's early albums and films.
Frederick Woodruff "Ted" Field is an American media mogul, record executive, entrepreneur and film producer.
Chappell & Co. was an English company that published music and manufactured pianos. Founded by pianist Samuel Chappell, the company was one of the leading music publishers and piano manufacturers in Britain until 1980 when Chappell sold its retail activities to concentrate solely on music publishing.
Warner Chappell Music, Inc. is an American music publishing company and a subsidiary of the Warner Music Group. Warner Chappell Music's catalog consists of over 1.4 million compositions and 100,000 composers, with offices in over 40 countries.
Joachim "Jean" Aberbach was an Austrian-born American music publisher. He was responsible, with his elder brother Julian, for establishing the Hill and Range music publishing house, and was instrumental in the careers of many leading country and popular music performers of the mid and late twentieth century, including Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel.
Hill & Range is a music publishing company which was particularly responsible for much of the country music produced in the 1950s and 1960s, and had control over the material recorded by Elvis Presley over that period. It is today part of Warner Chappell Music.
Martin N. Bandier is an American music industry executive who was the CEO/Chairman of Sony/ATV Music Publishing for 11 years from 2007 until 2019. Prior to that he was the chairman and CEO of EMI Music Publishing Worldwide from 1991 to 2006. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Alain Levy is an entertainment industry executive. He was born in Metz, France, on 19 December 1946.
Sean Maxwell Douglas is an American songwriter and record producer.
Max Dreyfus was a German-born American music publisher, arranger and songwriter. Between the 1910s and 1950s he encouraged and published the work of many of the writers of the so-called Great American Songbook, and was president of Chappell & Co., Inc. American office, the world's largest music publishing firm.
