Michael Nash is Executive Vice President, Digital Strategy and Business Development, for Warner Music Group. Since joining WMG in 2000, Nash has overseen WMG’s new media projects, strategic relationships and business development activities. He has also played a key role in building WMG’s distribution footprint and partnership portfolio, including important initiatives with AT&T, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Motorola, Verizon and Sony Ericsson. In addition to his responsibilities for driving WMG’s worldwide digital revenues, Nash has focused on the development and execution of WMG’s wireless strategy, spearheading deployment of new mobile music services and establishing a number of industry milestones.
During Nash’s tenure, WMG became the first music company to launch a music service with a US wireless carrier (AT&T Wireless, October 2002), the first to launch a wireless streaming music subscription service in the US (Sprint, January 2003), and the first to sell mobile music video downloads in the US (Verizon Wireless in January 2005). In this time WMG has also been an important wireless operator service launch partner supporting the introduction of major new products including full-track downloads, ring back tones, video ring tones and mobile bundles through agreements with other leading carriers including Vodafone, Orange, Hutchison and KDDI.
Four years ago, WMG had virtually no digital revenue, but in the second quarter of 2008, digital revenue of $164 million represented 21% of the company’s total revenue while digital sales made up 24% of its worldwide Recorded Music revenue and 34% of total U.S. Recorded Music revenue. According to SoundScan, WMG has consistently maintained its digital leadership showing the greatest U.S. digital album share advantage over physical album share of any of the major music companies since 2005.
Nash has been labeled a ”visionary” by The Atlantic Monthly, and has an extensive background in new media and the digital transformation of music, games and film. He was Executive Director of the Madison Project, an industry-first secure digital music distribution trial (1999); CEO and founder of Inscape, an interactive entertainment and games publishing joint venture with WMG and HBO that won numerous product awards (1994 - 1997); and Director of the Criterion Collection, where he worked closely with directors and artists such as Robert Altman, David Bowie, Terry Gilliam, Louis Malle, Nicolas Roeg and John Singleton on numerous special edition laserdiscs, the forerunner of the DVD format (1991 - 1994).
