Record Labels

In the two years that Cat Kreidich has served as president of Warner Music Group’s distribution company ADA Worldwide, she has focused on one overarching theme: reinvention.

The music industry veteran has spent the majority of her career in the distribution business. She first worked first at Caroline, then ADA, then at Sony’s The Orchard — where she spent eight years — before shifting to Sony’s catalog division for a little over a year in 2019. But when she returned to ADA as executive vp at the end of 2020, “It was invigorating,” she says, sitting in her office at WMG’s Manhattan headquarters. “I hadn’t expected to come back to ADA, but it makes perfect sense because the culture at Warner is very entrepreneurial. So coming back, to me, was an opportunity to make an impact on a company that I truly cared about.”

At the time, the distribution space was exploding. Consolidation, streaming and new players coming into the space were upending the status quo, and the business was moving faster, and with more volume, than ever before. ADA had a few specific challenges facing it in this new environment: a third-party company that handled its tech; a blurred line between ADA and Warner Music Group that made it sometimes unclear how services were handled; and the implosion of Direct Shot Distributing after Warner and ADA had shifted its physical business to the company — leading to supply-chain issues for vinyl and CDs even before the pandemic made that a larger issue.

Kreidich had spent eight years at The Orchard building its commercial insights team, integrating tech into how the company was expanding and parsing data to help optimize commercialization for the company’s label partners. So when it came to the issues that faced ADA upon her return, she had experience in addressing the problems. But just a few months into her tenure came another change: ADA’s then-president, Eliah Seton — whom she calls “a great advocate for me” — announced he was leaving the company. Just five months after coming in as executive vp, Kreidich became president of ADA.

Following that, Kreidich embarked on an overhaul of the company’s executive structure, bringing in a team she calls “the Avengers of Distribution.” That included Samantha Moore, who heads business operations and development; Adriana Sein, who oversees artist and market development globally; Cathy Bauer, who runs physical sales and marketing; Andrea Slobodien, ADA’s first-ever head of product and integration; and MaryLynne Drexler, who oversees business and legal affairs, among several others.

“We were really specific on how we were thinking about the kind of expertise that we wanted to be in the building,” Kreidich says. “And a lot of us are here because we believe that we can do it better [than the competition], and that opportunity to have that voice feels good.”

Now, after two years of reinvention, Kreidich has the team in place to continue to fine-tune ADA as a leader in the global distribution business, which is expanding by the day. The company has launched offices in Canada, Latin America, Japan and across Europe, among others, while WMG has acquired distributors Qanawat in the Middle East and Africori in Africa to further expand their distribution offerings there, too. “At Warner, we want to have an environment where creatives, entrepreneurs and artists at every stage in their career can thrive — where there are as many different avenues as possible into the WMG ecosystem,” says Warner Recorded Music CEO Max Lousada. “What Cat and the team at ADA are doing is an essential part of our ability to partner with the full spectrum of talent. She’s relentless in her passion for the indie community and her mission to empower ADA-supported artists and labels.”

Now, as ADA celebrates its 30th anniversary this month, Kreidich speaks to Billboard about the company’s reinvention over the past two years, what a distributor can offer in the current music business and ADA’s new brand. “I’m really proud of that and the work we’ve done because I think it really nails who we are now,” she says. “I believe in the culture and I have a real soft spot in my heart for it. So I’m happy to celebrate it.”

You’ve worked at Universal, EMI, Warner, Sony and now Warner again. What were some of the things you picked up at each of those places along the way?

I started my career at Universal Motown and then went on to Virgin, and the reason why I ended up at Caroline was because of the passion for the music and the labels. My passion was always to work with the music that I loved and identified with, so I think a big part of being at each of those places was really understanding culture and the culture of representing music from a lot of different backgrounds and styles. And I think the meaning that that has — when people come together to unite for independence and music that they actually care about in a very personal way, not just a professional way — is one of the biggest things I learned and I wanted to be around and create wherever I continued my career.

I certainly thought many times of diversifying, but I always came back to the landscape of independent labels and artists. And I think that landscape has changed dramatically over the years, and the needs have changed. So the other thing I learned was really that value for a client or a label or a partner doesn’t always look the same in distribution, and many times labels are so busy running their businesses that they don’t necessarily have time to stop and ask you what your value is. So it’s being able to creatively come up with different ways to look at the business, or different ways that a label might have not considered.

You came back to ADA at the end of 2020. What were those first couple months back like?

The first thing I did was come in and interview over 40 people in the organization, mostly at ADA, some at Warner, and asked them the same 10 questions. They were generally, “How do you feel about the business? What would labels say about us?” And then I gathered all of those answers and created a presentation for Eliah. Because I knew how I felt about the business, but I also really wanted to understand how people felt about the business, because I didn’t want to make assumptions. And I think that was a really powerful thing to do, and I think it also helped me to come back to ADA authentically and genuinely; I wasn’t just trying to come here and make it The Orchard, I was truly wanting to listen and hear what were the things that we needed to solve for.

What were the conclusions from that?

There was obviously a need for process and empowerment by technology. Our technology was a third-party company that was facilitating the relationship within Warner, so that sometimes [we] just didn’t talk to each other, as third-party companies do. There was also a need for us to differentiate what it is what we do as ADA and what it is Warner does. Having run commercial teams for most of my career, it was always something that people would talk about — “ADA uses Warner to pitch” — and that wasn’t necessarily the truth. But there were things that we needed to do better together and things that we needed to do on our own, and during that time what came out of those talks was, “We need to figure out where the lines were, and then reorient those lines to make the relationships better and more clear.”

You’ve spoken a few times that once you took over as president, you embarked on a “reinvention” of ADA. Why did it need one and how did you implement it?

Warner had not made the same tech investments or acquisitions that the other majors did. They had been growing their [distribution] business as it was in this very shared service mentality that had worked for a while, and I think there was an opportunity clearly to take advantage of more and more music in small corners of the world as more and more DSPs were saturating markets with subscriptions. So it was really about three things for me. It was about being an indie advocate — that education, that understanding and helping to define what it is we do and what it is Warner does with us. It was also bringing in a skill set that was different from what I had seen at other distribution companies.

And one thing I noticed throughout my career was always, labels, managers and artists want to have expertise, and more and more artists want to own their own rights and be in control of their businesses. And that expertise to understand how other people are doing things, especially around audience development, actionable commercial insights, whether it’s growing an artist or helping with travel or breaking an artist in other countries and bringing them back — that skillset of marketing and artist development doesn’t necessarily exist in full force at tech companies, because it’s just the nature of the game.

So we were really specific about the kinds of talent we were bringing in that was going to differentiate us as we built our tech. And that was really the third thing that was most important, not only for just the idea of getting a piece of content from here to the DSP and back but also just tools and tech that would help us communicate over time zones better, help us to ignite priorities without having to email something. So I think that advocacy and audience development and marketing from a global perspective and the tech piece were the three big things we were changing.

You had gone to work at Sony’s catalog division — then a pandemic happened, and you then came back to distribution. A lot of things changed in a very short amount of time. What did you feel like had to change here because of how many things in the industry had shifted?

The great thing is that ADA is a music company. But ADA needs to be empowered by those tools and technologies that allow communication to happen easily. You can do your business with a carrier pigeon, a rotary telephone and a Yahoo email address — you could get it done — but the truth is, if you don’t have to think about those things, there’s so much more you can do. And let’s face it: we are at a point in the evolution of music formats where there’s so much volume, [thousands of] new tracks are being uploaded, social media is ubiquitous. You don’t want to have to worry about whether something got there or came back or how it worked. So I think the tools, like delivery technology that works; a self-serve platform where you can find out the basic information so that when you’re getting on the phone with somebody you’re talking about things that matter; having the strengths and the ability to talk about artist development and commercial insights and data and how things are flowing — if you have those, then you have a really competitive organization.

You also focused a lot on global expansion and having representation in both emerging and new markets, but also places like Latin America. How did you prioritize all these things?

I’ll give credit to Alfonso [Perez-Soto], who is the emerging markets leader and is a tremendous business development person inside of Warner. That track was already full-blown and a part of Warner’s larger strategy. But the truth is that in places like the Middle East and Africa, those established businesses don’t exist from a record label standpoint, so investing in distribution companies that could develop over time was really a part of that strategy. For us, first and foremost, credit to Eliah — he was able to garner a budget way before I got here and really broke the ice and started bringing people in, and Latin America was obviously really relevant in the sector, and that was a territory he really doubled down in. So we have a significant amount of people in Latin America that are ADA and distribution-focused.

But then I would say what was most important with Alfonso was we acquired Qanawat, we acquired Africori, and there’s many more to come that have not been announced yet that we’re currently working on. Once you’re looking at acquiring companies, then you’re looking at prioritizing what’s going to be most important and most impactful when it comes to market share, what are the feature sets we have to build to make sure we’re giving these labels an equal if not better level of service than they’re already receiving, because it’s distribution deals — they can walk away. So for us, the experience we brought in, it was about understanding what we could ingest the quickest, and what was going to make the most impact. But as far as the acquisitions, they were really part of the larger Warner strategy, though they are the ADA teams.

As you guys continue to expand, what are the challenges and potential pitfalls?

I think the biggest challenge is that there is a lot of competition out there, and it’s hard to compete with rates and advances. There’s a lot of money being thrown around in the distribution market, because there’s venture capital companies, there’s a lot of tourists. So I think that the challenge of growing our business, being a successful distribution company globally and also in the U.S., is making sure that we’re doing smart deals and building our business and delivering value.

I also think ADA is back and revitalized and has a new perspective, especially in the U.S. business, and I think that’s new to people. And reintroducing ourselves and letting people know what we’re doing is best done through our successes. In places around the world we’ve hired some really amazing teams, and it feels different and cool and new because ADA didn’t always really exist in all these territories. And in the U.S., it’s more of an education process because there’s so much competition and because, you know, distribution — it’s the hot new thing. For me, I guess, I’m here because I’ve always loved it.

It’s interesting you brought it up in that way, because I feel like you hear that a lot in the catalog acquisition space — there’s outside money coming in, there are companies coming in that don’t have track records in the music business — I hadn’t thought about the parallels here, too.

And all of that is about to become independent. All of these companies buying music catalogs, they have to put them somewhere, and a lot of them are buying rights that haven’t reverted yet. So those catalogs are now moving around. There’s going to be even more infusion, and I think that there’s a real opportunity. I’m very happy for my experience at Sony catalog, because working catalog is not easy, and I’m hoping that there’s an opportunity for us to continue thinking about tools and tech that can optimize catalogs. Because catalog is more important than it ever was before, and you never know when it’s coming; you have to be proactively reactive. And it’s going to be an opportunity.

What do you look for in bringing on new label partners?

I think the most important thing that we look for is the ability to partner both ways. When we first started, it was really the idea of, “How can we use each other as strengths?” Because when it’s a one-way relationship, okay, it’s transactional and we’re a distributor and you’re a label. Value comes differently for every partner. But I think one of the biggest things is a label wants to know that you’re paying attention and are able to think of opportunity either before or maybe in a different place than they would think about opportunity. We try to be very strategic yet tactical when we do business reviews, and we leave it up to three to five key things that we have to do and be able to measure those things. So of course there’s planning and proactiveness that you can do. But there’s nothing better than getting a call from your distributor and them saying, “Oh my god, I just saw a spike, let’s do this.”

You’ve been president for two years now. When you look back, what are you most proud of in that time?

First of all my team. Bringing in the executives I have is probably the biggest highlight, and empowering them. Also launching Co-Op, which is our proprietary product for third-party labels and artists, which we launched in October. No small feat. And overall I would say the successes that we’ve been able to generate with Quevedo and Central Cee. We just had a No. 1 in India with the Sean Paul–Shaggy–Spice track [“Go Down Deh,”] that literally came from us seeing a spark and starting to work it locally. We just had a No. 1 with Ayliva in Germany that beat out Miley Cyrus. So we definitely have these big wins and I hope to have many more to talk about in the future, but it honestly couldn’t happen without the team that I brought in and the relationships that we created with the ADA folks that have been here before and the new folks that have come in. And I’m really looking forward to holding a global conference and getting everybody together. Being able to be together and appreciate that is what I hope to do for the entire organization.