Christiaan Kröner (NL)

Christiaan Kröner is the President of FUGA, the world’s leading B2B music distribution, marketing and technology business and division of Downtown Music.

Kröner was a founding member of one of the first crowdfunding platforms for music, SellaBand, before joining FUGA’s Amsterdam headquarters in 2012, where he led the distributor’s growing services department. Conscious of the innovation required in a then declining market, Christiaan used his strong digital music business management skills to build FUGA’s aggregation and marketing department from scratch.

After his promotion to COO in 2020, Christiaan played a key part in FUGA growing its international footprint. He has overseen a 30% increase of staff since the beginning of 2021, with new business hubs launched in Germany, South Korea, Brazil and Sweden.

Kröner has also been instrumental in building and developing both FUGA’s marketing services and its licensing and royalty accounting departments. FUGA’s marketing services team, reporting to Kröner, was nominated for its second subsequent Label Services award at the Music Week Awards 2022

In the last few years, Christiaan Kröner has overseen one of the industry’s most exciting and pioneering joint ventures – FUGA and Japanese music and media company Space Shower Networks’ new enterprise, SPACE SHOWER FUGA. Announced at the end of 2020 and open for business as of September 2021, SPACE SHOWER FUGA has helped open up the Japanese region for independent music companies, adding 15 new DSPs to FUGA’s industry-leading cohort of platforms, whilst building out expertise on the ground.

Alongside this, Kröner has led efforts to more closely integrate FUGA’s proprietary technology with Downtown Music Holding’s other businesses, notably Downtown Neighbouring Rights, which merged with FUGA’s own Neighbouring Rights service in 2021.

Kröner has been twice recognised in the Billboard International Power Player list 2022 + 2023 and Indie Power Players list in 2023.