Scott Ambrose Reilly is a

music executive A music executive or record executive is a person within a record label who works in senior management and makes executive decisions over the label's artists. Their role varies greatly but in essence, they can oversee one, or many, aspects of a re ...

whose expertise is in the

digital music Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical samples in a continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, samp ...

field. Since 2000, Reilly has held senior positions in digital music companies such as Digital Club Network,

eMusic eMusic is an online music and audiobook store that operates by subscription. In exchange for a monthly subscription eMusic users can download a fixed number of MP3 tracks per month. eMusic was established in 1998, is headquartered in New York Ci ...

and

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...

. He is currently CEO of

X5 Music Group X5 Music Group is a record label based in Stockholm, Sweden with a branch in Manhattan, New York. Founded in 2003, it is a digital-only label that primarily licenses pre-existing music for compilation albums. X5 originally focused on classical mus ...

. When Reilly exited Amazon's music division for its Kindle unit, his farewell letter to peers was leaked to the media and widely circulated for criticism of many in the established music industry.

Career

Artist management

Raised in

San Diego, California San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...

, Scott Ambrose Reilly started his music career as a fan, and spent much of the late 1980s following artists such as

Mojo Nixon Mojo Nixon (born Neill Kirby McMillan, Jr.; August 2, 1957) is an American musician and actor best known for his humorous, irreverent Novelty song "Elvis Is Everywhere" which was an alternative staple on MTV. His style can generally be defined ...

to gigs. Nixon soon hired him to help on tour, and from there he became Nixon's long-term manager. He also appeared in the choir of several of his

psychobilly Psychobilly is a rock music fusion genre that fuses elements of rockabilly and punk rock. It's been defined as "loud frantic rockabilly music", it has also been said that it "takes the traditional countrified rock style known as rockabilly, ram ...

albums, such as 1989's '' Root Hog or Die''. From 1986 to 1999 Reilly owned and operated Bullethead Management in the greater

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

area. The company grew from being a one-man artist management practice to having twelve employees and over 20 clients, including Mojo Nixon,

Dash Rip Rock Dash Rip Rock is an American rock band. Originally playing rockabilly and country music, the band is best known for its cowpunk sound, which mixes punk rock, rockabilly, hard rock, country and boogie. ''The New York Times'' stated that Dash Rip ...

and

Fred Eaglesmith Frederick John Elgersma (born July 9, 1957), known by the stage name Fred Eaglesmith, is a Canadian alternative country singer-songwriter. He is known for writing songs about vehicles, rural life, down-and-out characters, lost love and quirky rur ...

. Reilly began using

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...

systems to sell concert tickets online, and regularly attended concerts such as

SXSW South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, Te ...

. In the 1990s he began managing the band

God Street Wine God Street Wine (also known as GSW) is a jam band from New York City. Their music is an amalgam of rock, jazz, bluegrass, funk, psychedelia, pop, Americana, reggae, progressive, and more. The band broke up in 1999 and reunited in 2009. GSW playe ...

, who were early adopters of internet promotion. They launched a website in 1994, also selling tickets and

mp3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

s online.

Digital Club Network

In 2000 Reilly became executive director of Digital Club Festival, the four-day launch event for Digital Club Network, or DCN. DCN was a New York-based website that

webcast A webcast is a media presentation distributed over the Internet using streaming media technology to distribute a single content source to many simultaneous listeners/viewers. A webcast may either be distributed live or on demand. Essentially, web ...

live from 54 music venues across the country, making it the world's largest webcaster of live music at the time. Digital Club Network also offered paid music downloads and a few live CDs by artists such as the

Meat Puppets Meat Puppets are an American rock band formed in January 1980 in Phoenix, Arizona. The group's original lineup was Curt Kirkwood (guitar/vocals), his brother Cris Kirkwood (bass guitar/vocals), and Derrick Bostrom (drums). The Kirkwood brothers ...

on its own label. From 2000 to 2003 he was Senior VP of venue/artist licensing and relations of DCN, and he became president in 2003. In 2004 he oversaw DCN's acquisition by

. Reilly was named Senior VP of Content Acquisition and Label Relations, and the eMusic catalog grew from 400,000 tracks to 1.5million tracks, making it the largest

DRM DRM may refer to: Government, military and politics * Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd * Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar * Direction du renseignement militai ...

-free catalog in the world. While at eMusic from 2004 to 2006, Reilly also became president of eMusicLive and helped develop eMusicLive's "See a Show, Buy a Show" (SASBAS) technology, where the company recorded the live performances of consenting artists, then instantly burned CDs to sell alongside band merchandise. eMusicLive was the first company to have permanent fixtures in multiple clubs in a single city.

Amazon.com

;

Amazon MP3 Amazon Music (previously Amazon MP3) is a music streaming platform and online music store operated by Amazon. Launched in public beta on September 25, 2007, in January 2008 it became the first music store to sell music without digital rights man ...

In September 2006, he moved to

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

to oversee the launched of

in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark ...

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

, and

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. Hired as senior manager of digital music at

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...

, Reilly oversaw content deals, operations and helped maintain relationships with labels. Amazon MP3 became iTune's most aggressive competitor, building a DRM-free catalog of more than 15 million tracks. Around 2007, most online digital music was purchased from

iTunes iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mul ...

, with Apple DRM contained so they could only function on

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

products. Allofmp3.com, one of the few early DRM-free businesses, were sued and forced out of business, leaving Apple with the monopoly. Under Reilly Amazon opened an online DRM-free music library at 99 cents a song, becoming the first service to launch all four major labels in MP3 format. Apple followed suit, beginning to offer DRM-free options. ; Kindle In April 2010 he left Amazon MP3 to work on the Amazon division Kindle. He stated he had overseen more than 10,000 digital licensing deals at that point in his career. When Reilly exited for Kindle, his farewell letter to the music industry was leaked to the media and widely circulated. He spoke positively of Amazon, but with open contempt for its competitors. Specifically, they'd pressured recording companies to drop support for Amazon's successful Daily Deal practice, where Amazon lowered prices on specific music titles and promoted them heavily the day before they were released. While at Kindle he worked as senior manager for global business development. However, one year later he announced he was leaving Amazon to serve as the U.S. CEO of

. His reasons were again amicable towards Amazon, with him stating: "I loved working at Amazon and their singular focus on the customer taught me a great deal. But the lure of working with a music great company who have had successes in digital music was just too strong."

X5 Music Group

As North American CEO of X5 Music Group, Reilly helped launch the division in the

Empire State Building The Empire State Building is a 102-story Art Deco skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The building was designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon and built from 1930 to 1931. Its name is derived from "Empire State", the nickname of the st ...

and expanded its catalogue of compilations. In 2011 X5 was the No. 2 classical music label on the US charts, second only to

Universal Music Universal Music Group N.V. (often abbreviated as UMG and referred to as just Universal Music) is a Netherlands, Dutch–United States, American multinational Music industry, music corporation under Law of the Netherlands, Dutch law. UMG's cor ...

. Also in 2011 the classical label began branching into genres such as

folk Folk or Folks may refer to: Sociology *Nation *People * Folklore ** Folk art ** Folk dance ** Folk hero ** Folk music *** Folk metal *** Folk punk *** Folk rock ** Folk religion * Folk taxonomy Arts, entertainment, and media * Folk Plus or Fol ...

, bluegrass,

blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

, and

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...

, and forming partnerships with non-classical labels such as

Sun Records Sun Records is an American independent record label founded by producer Sam Phillips in Memphis, Tennessee in February 1952. Sun was the first label to record Elvis Presley, Charlie Rich, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny C ...

, whose back catalog included artists such as

Johnny Cash John R. Cash (born J. R. Cash; February 26, 1932 – September 12, 2003) was an American country singer-songwriter. Much of Cash's music contained themes of sorrow, moral tribulation, and redemption, especially in the later stages of his ca ...

and

Jerry Lee Lewis Jerry Lee Lewis (September 29, 1935October 28, 2022) was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Nicknamed "The Killer", he was described as "rock & roll's first great wild man". A pioneer of rock and roll and rockabilly music, Lewis made ...

. In November 2011 X5 released one of its most successful albums, ''

The Greatest Video Game Music ''The Greatest Video Game Music'', performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, features classical orchestrations of video game themes including those from ''Super Mario Bros.'', ''Call of Duty'', ''Metal Gear Solid'', ''Final Fantasy'', ''Halo ...

,'' performed by the

London Philharmonic Orchestra The London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) is one of five permanent symphony orchestras based in London. It was founded by the conductors Sir Thomas Beecham and Malcolm Sargent in 1932 as a rival to the existing London Symphony and BBC Symphony ...

. It received praise from ''

IGN ''IGN'' (formerly ''Imagine Games Network'') is an American video game and entertainment media website operated by IGN Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, Inc. The company's headquarters is located in San Francisco's SoMa distri ...

'' and was named "weirdest hit album" of 2011 by ''

Rolling Stone ''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first kno ...

''. At X5 Reilly manages relationships with digital music services including iTunes, Amazon, Spotify,

Deezer Deezer is a French online music streaming service. It allows users to listen to music content from record labels, as well as podcasts on various devices online or offline. Created in Paris, Deezer currently has 90 million licensed tracks in i ...

Xbox Music Groove Music (formerly Xbox Music or Zune Music Pass) is a discontinued audio player software application included with Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. The app is also associated with a now-discontinued music streaming service, Groov ...

, MOG,

Rhapsody Rhapsody may refer to: * A work of epic poetry, or part of one, that is suitable for recitation at one time ** Rhapsode, a classical Greek professional performer of epic poetry Computer software * Rhapsody (online music service), an online m ...

for USA, EU, Australia, Asia and ROW. About X5's marketing strategy, Reilly has stated "you have to pay attention to the utlets iTunes wants things to be designed well and look good. Amazon ikesvalue and convenience. Spotify is search-based, so we created an app to browse classical music, and other apps are on the way." Reilly oversaw the launch in early 2012 of Classify, an app created through a partnership with X5 and Spotify that helps music browsers discover classical music. X5 announced in April 2013 that it had started U5, a joint venture with the music conglomerate Universal Music Group, headed by Reilly. It gave X5 access to over 50,000 of Universal's classical tracks, and another 50,000 jazz and blues songs. Reilly has been interviewed about digital media in media outlets such as ''

Marketplace A marketplace or market place is a location where people regularly gather for the purchase and sale of provisions, livestock, and other goods. In different parts of the world, a marketplace may be described as a '' souk'' (from the Arabic), ' ...

,'' the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', and the ''

Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

''.

The Orchard

Scott started at The Orchard in May 2013. As head of a newly created division at The Orchard, Scott oversees the acquisition of new catalogs. Some of the catalogs already under his supervision include,

TVT Records TVT Records (Tee-Vee Tunes) was an American record label founded by Steve Gottlieb. Over the course of its 24-year history, the label released 25 Gold, Platinum and Multi-Platinum releases. Its roster included Nine Inch Nails, Ja Rule, Lil Jon, ...

Hathut Records Hathut Records is a Swiss record company and label founded by Werner Xavier Uehlinger in 1974 that specializes in jazz and classical music. The name of the label comes from the artwork of Klaus Baumgartner. Hathut encompasses the labels hat ART, h ...

and

Xanadu Records Xanadu Records was a jazz record label founded in 1975 by Don Schlitten. It was most active during the 1970s and 1980s and stopped recording in the 1990s. The catalogue was bought by emusic in 1999, but no new music was produced. In 2007, the cat ...

. Scott's division recently acquired the

Blind Pig Records Blind Pig Records is an American blues independent record label. Blind Pig was formed in 1977 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by Jerry Del Giudice, owner of the Blind Pig Cafe, and his friend Edward Chmelewski. The label is now based in San Francisco. I ...

catalog.

Discography

With
Mojo Nixon Mojo Nixon (born Neill Kirby McMillan, Jr.; August 2, 1957) is an American musician and actor best known for his humorous, irreverent Novelty song "Elvis Is Everywhere" which was an alternative staple on MTV. His style can generally be defined ...
and
Skid Roper Skid Roper (born Richard Banke, October 19, 1954, in National City, California, United States) is an American musician, most active in the 1980s and early 1990s. He has recorded with several groups including the surf band The Evasions, but is bes ...

*1986: ''

Get Out Of My Way! ''Get Out of My Way!'' is the first extended play by Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper. It was released in 1986 as a vinyl mini-album and cassette on Restless Records. The songs were added to the CD release of the album ''Frenzy'' in 1987. "Stuffin' Mart ...

'' (

Restless Records Restless Records is a record label that was started in El Segundo, California in 1986 by Enigma Records and primarily released alternative, metal, and punk records. Restless also licensed and released records from Bar/None Records, Metal Blade R ...

) *1987: ''

Bo-Day-Shus!!! ''Bo-Day-Shus!!!'' is the third album by Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, released in 1987. It contains the song "Elvis is Everywhere," which became an MTV hit. The album peaked at #189 on the ''Billboard'' 200. Production Skid Roper wrote and sang ...

'' (

Enigma Records Enigma Records (also known as Enigma Entertainment Corporation) was a popular rock and alternative American record label in the 1980s. History Enigma Records launched as a division of Greenworld Distribution, an independent music importer/dis ...

) *1989: '' Root Hog or Die'' (

I.R.S. Records I.R.S. Records was an American record label founded by Miles Copeland III, Jay Boberg, and Carl Grasso in 1979. I.R.S. produced some of the most popular bands of the 1980s, and was particularly known for issuing records by college rock, new wave ...

) ... choir/chorus *1990: '' Unlimited Everything'' (

)

References

External links

Scott Reilly
at

LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job se ...

(Official) {{DEFAULTSORT:Reilly, Scott Ambrose Living people American music industry executives Year of birth missing (living people)