User:Fact Loving Criminal/Kurt Thielen

Kurt Thielen (born 24 June 1958 in Duisburg, Germany) is a German music executive, manager and audiobook publisher. After being director at Rough Trade Distribution, the German branch of Rough Trade Records, and Zomba Records for Germany, Austria and Switzerland for more than 20 years, he founded Zebralution, the first digital distributor for independent record labels in Europe that is today one of the world's largest digital distributors of music as well as audiobooks, together with music journalist and lawyer Sascha Lazimbat. He is managing partner of the Berlin company of which the German GEMA acquired a majority stake in 2019. Thielen is also a publisher of audiobooks with Finch & Zebra.

Career
Thielen started his career in 1979 in a record store and worked from 1982 till 1983 at the Bochum club venue Zeche. He then moved to the German dependance of Geoff Travis' Rough Trade which was founded in 1982 in Herne. There Thielen went through all possible positions until he became managing director in 1986. When the British mother firm went bankrupt in 1991, the German Rough Trade Distribution GmbH could save itself, with Thielen becoming a ten per cent partner. The majority of RTD went to the British distributor Pinnacle Entertainment, which in turn was bought up by Zomba in 1996. Thielen stayed until 2002, when Clive Calder of Zomba decided to quit the music business and Zomba was bought by BMG, and the company was downsized and restructured. He has worked with a variety of acts from New Order and The Smiths to Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake.

Thielen then became a consultant for Vodaphone before he founded Zebralution, the first European digital distributor for independent labels with a global focus in 2004 together with Sascha Lazimbat. The name of the company refers to the Duisburg football team MSV Duisburg which is commonly referred to as Zebras and of which Thielen was a board member. In 2007, the Warner Music Group acquired Zebralution. Digital audiobooks and streaming in particular have been an important factor in Zebralution's portfolio since 2010. In April 2017, Thielen bought the company back from Warner together with Lazimbat and two other music managers, Christoph Ellinghaus from City Slang, and Konrad von Löhneysen from Embassy of Music.

On December 4, 2019, the German collecting society for music, GEMA, announced that it had acquired a majority stake of 75.1 per cent in the company. Zebralution continues to operate as an independent company in Berlin under the GEMA umbrella. The owners of Zebralution are still shareholders. Thielen and Lazimbat remained managing directors.

Thielen became a partner in the label Stereo Deluxe in 2005 and has been the manager of songwriter Michael Kersting and the artist Cosmo Klein. In addition, Thielen founded the audio book publisher Finch & Zebra together with Sabine Buß in 2016 and entered the podcast business with zebra-audio.net.

Awards
From 1998 to 2003 and from 2005 to 2007, Thielen was a board member of the German International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

In October 2018, Thielen was recognized by the IG Hörbuch of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels as the ″Audiobook Person of the Year 2018″.