Warner Music Japan Appoints Dr. Kenji Kitatani as Chairman

Warner Music Japan has appointed Dr. Kenji Kitatani to the resurrected role of chairman of the label division, effective immediately. Dr. Kitatani will work closely with WMJ’s longtime president and CEO, Kazuyuki “Kaz” Kobayashi, to boost the company’s presence in the globe’s No. 2 music market.

Dr. Kitatani currently holds the title of chairman of DAZN Japan, a sports streaming platform, and he regularly writes for Forbes Japan and is a professor and director at the Institute for Content and Technology Integration at Kanazawa Institute of Technology. (His priors in academia also include faculty roles at Washington State University and Indiana University.) In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he held senior executive roles at Sony Corporation and between 2011 and 2017 acted as president of Avex International Holdings, the country’s largest independent music entertainment conglomerate.

Following his time at Avex Inc., Dr. Kitatani became executive vp of Asia and executive director for Japan at AEG, leaving in late 2021 before taking up a bevy of advisory roles at companies including Mitsubishi, NTTdocomo, InnoCan Pharma and FM Tokyo, among others.

“I am delighted to welcome Dr Kenji Kitatani to Warner Music and am pleased that such a distinguished executive has agreed to take on this challenge,” said Kobayashi. “We’ve achieved a lot in the last decade at Warner Music Japan, but our industry never stands still and we need to continue to adapt if we are to keep being the first choice for our country’s most exciting artists.”

Though technically not replacing anyone as chairman of Warner Music Japan, Dr. Kitatani is not the first executive to hold the vaulted title. The last person to occupy the position was industry veteran Kei Ishizaka, Kobayashi’s predecessor as CEO until Ishizaka’s departure in 2014.

“This is an exciting time in the Japanese music industry,” said Kitatani. “I am delighted to take up this new role at Warner Music, working with Kaz on the continuing evolution of the company as we build the most forward-thinking label in the Japanese market.”