Will Mills, who for the past 18 months has been Music and Content VP at discovery app Shazam, has left the company to join B2B lyric licensing company LyricFind.
Mills becomes LyricFind’s Chief Revenue Officer, based out of the firm’s new London office. The business’s existing major partners include Deezer, Amazon, HTC and Microsoft.
During Mills’s tenure at Shazam, he was responsible for majority of Shazam’s deals with the global music industry, and led the teams that delivered content ingestion, editorial content, promotions and many other business development initiatives that were critical in Shazam’s growth.
Prior to taking the VP of Music & Content job, Mills acted as Shazam’s Director of Music & Content from 2008, executing worldwide licensing deals with the likes of Warner Music Group and Sony Music. He led the global expansion of the company’s music database from 1 million to 28 million tracks.
Mills joined Shazam in 2003 as Head Of Music, having left his previous role as A&R Manager at Honeybeat Records.
“I’m hugely excited to be joining LyricFind at this exciting point in it’s history and building on the existing great foundations.” said Mills (pictured).
“There are many welcome similarities to LyricFind as to when I joined Shazam; namely, market leadership in the B2B space, roughly the same sized team and enormous room for growth. Lyric search is also one of the leading music discovery methods. I look forward to using my experience to help grow LyricFind with our many partners and new partners worldwide.”
“We’re very excited to have Will joining the LyricFind team.” said Darryl Ballantyne, LyricFind’s CEO. “Having worked with Will for years during his time at Shazam, we’ve always known him to be a smart and highly effective executive, and we couldn’t think of anyone better to lead our continued global expansion.”
Mills also co-invented patented technology around Media/Lyric synchronization at Shazam. At LyricFind, he will be responsible for leading the team on all global business development and sales.
Andrew Stess, LyricFind’s previous Chief Revenue Officer, will be remaining on LyricFind’s Board of Directors and also on the Business Development team on the West Coast.Music Business Worldwide
