User:Gerrit Meier

Gerrit Meier is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Clear Channel Online Music & Radio, a division of Clear Channel Radio, which is focused on bringing terrestrial radio listeners online to the company's network of approximately 1,200 radio station websites in the USA. In this role, he oversees the group’s operations, finance, eCommerce, technology and business development functions. He lives in Connecticut with his wife Nadia and his two sons Max and Xander. He holds degrees from the European Business School in London and Harvard Business School in Boston.

Actively involved in the global media and entertainment area for more than ten years, Gerrit has been working with a number of large companies and has published works by Harvard University and McGraw-Hill on the evolution of the music industry and the topic of digital music distribution; he has also contributed to publications on the subject of user-generated content.

His time at Harvard coincided with the proliferation of the original Napster which caused a wide-ranging reaction in the international music community. Napster, the high school nickname of Shawn Fanning who wrote the software for storing songs in such a way that they “lived” on users’ machines rather than a central computer, dramatically changed the music industry by making songs freely available through “peer-to-peer” on the internet without rightful clearance from and compensation to the music’s rightsholders.

Using Napster as the catalyst for change impacting all aspects of the music industry, from manufacturing, distribution to sales and marketing, Gerrit built a case study around how traditional record companies would need to align themselves internally if the digital music format was to become a permanent and, over time, a larger part of their business. With BMG Music and its then CEO, Strauss Zelnick, Gerrit found a great company and an executive who were willing to be the centre of a case that tried to address this issue. His case study was published by Harvard, who hold the copyright. Harvard is still using his case study as are over 100 other top business schools in the world and is held up to be a seminal piece of work, both in its in-depth research and its application to the challenges faced by traditional record companies in today’s digitally driven world.

Gerrit was previously responsible for EMI Music’s digital business in North America, where he was in charge of defining new business models, negotiating and closing digital deals with retail partners and integrating digital into EMI’s operating units. He also served as Vice President of Strategy for the EMI Group where he worked with EMI’s senior management to identify new opportunities inside and outside of the traditional operational scope of a music company.

Prior to EMI, Gerrit headed Corporate Development for BMG Music, now SonyBMG Entertainment, in North America, where he led the development and management of internal initiatives aimed to accelerate operational improvement and the streamlining of business practices. He also served as Director of Corporate Development for Bertelsmann Inc., oversaw BMG’s international new media activities and served as a strategy consultant with Accenture’s Media & Entertainment Practice in London focusing on operational and strategic issues regarding the future of the entertainment industry, digital content distribution and converging media technologies.

--Gerrit Meier (talk) 15:46, 4 April 2008 (UTC)