Merck Mercuriadis (CA)

Merck Mercuriadis is the Canadian-born music business veteran whose name, well-known and legendary to those in the music industry, has now become familiar to the financial sector as well. In less than three years, he has steered Hipgnosis Songs Fund, Ltd.—a publicly traded, UK-based company invested in music publishing—to a leading position in a global market, building on a career’s worth of successful growth and defying trends at a time when words like “lockdown” and “pandemic” are commonly heard. In 2020, Mercuriadis remains one of the few music business leaders who excelled at positions in record companies and in artist management, surviving—in fact, thriving—through the most dramatic of shifts in music styles and technology from the analogue days of the 1980s—from LPs and CDs, to the mp3 files and streaming of today’s digital world. His credits range from head of A&R at Virgin Records in 1986—a position he achieved in his first three years in the business—to running an international management agency, spearheading chart-topping discs by the likes of Morrissey, Kelly Osbourne, and Iron Maiden, to guiding the careers of Beyoncé, Elton John, Guns’N’Roses, Robert Plant, Macy
Gray, Mary J. Blige, Joss Stone, Jane's Addiction, and many others.
In 1986, Mercuriadis co-founded Sanctuary Music (UK), which grew to become one of the most formidable independent artist management/booking/promotion firms in music history. He helped run and revive a number of record labels as well. Since departing Sanctuary in 2006, while continuing to personally manage major stars including, most notably, Nile Rodgers & CHIC, and working with major songwriters like Diane Warren and The Dream.
In 2017, Mercuriadis realized the most ambitious project of his career— forming Hipgnosis Songs Fund, Ltd., an artist- and songwriter-focused music publishing company aimed at investing in song catalogues with the goal of both protecting the financial interests and empowering the role of music creators i