Swedish X5 Music continues its venture in the U.S. by recruiting key personnel from American amazon.com.
Scott Ambrose Reilly, former executive at Amazon mp3 as well as an icon within the digital music industry has been recruited to expand X5 Music in the U.S. Scott has built the amazon.com music store to become a challenge to Apple’s monopoly. It is now the second largest net store for music in the world. Reilly is also known for getting the big record labels to start selling music without copy protection. Except for Reilly, Joy O’Shell has recently been recruited from amazon. Joy O’Shell was formerly the one in charge of Indie music at amazon and will be working as the COO together with Scott Ambrose Reilly at the new office in the Empire State Building in New York.
– Scott and Joy has reached agreements with thousands of companies and artists in the U.S. and their network and profound knowledge are unique. Amazon succeeding to break Apple’s “monopoly†of the digital music sales in the U.S. has been extremely important in the development of the industry as a whole. X5 is breaking new ground as well and with the great asset of a closeknit team with unique experiences we can start right away, says Johan Lagerlöf, CEO of X5 Music.
This year X5 will have about 5-10 employees at the office in New York. The work will be focused on signing artist and music catalogues in the U.S. as well as marketing company products.
– At amazon we have always seen X5 as a leading company to work with digitally. At the moment there are substantial changes in the music industry and X5 has taken a unique position in the digital world. To me this is an extremely exciting possibility and I think we have created a real dream team with the Sweden-U.S. set-up, Scott Ambrose Reilly tells Musikindustrin.