At this year's Women In Music Awards, we celebrated the achievements of 13 game-changing executives and artists as the industry came together to honour their work. Music Week has spoken to all 13 winners to tell their stories.
Words: Karen Bliss
In June this year, Molly Neuman became president of CD Baby, having previously served as chief marketing officer of Downtown Music Holdings.
Her tenure in the role could scarcely have got off to a better start because, now, Neuman has been crowned International Woman Of The Year at the Music Week Women In Music Awards 2024.
Neuman has nearly three decades of experience in various leadership roles, including as president of Downtown’s publishing administration company Songtrust, which she became president of in 2019, helping it grow to manage over three million copyrights for more than 350,000 writers in 145 countries.
“I became president of CD Baby to bring back a little bit of what I had brought to Songtrust with some fresh eyes,” Neuman tells Music Week. “CD Baby has been around for 26 years and has a tremendous position, but we're looking ahead to the future and what modern musicians need and trying to put all of that together with an aligned offer. That's what we're going to be working on mostly in 2025.”
Neuman began her musical career drumming in ’90s punk band Bratmobile, who helped pioneer the ‘riot grrrl’ movement. She would later become head of music at Kickstarter, interim president and vice president of the American Association Of Independent Music (A2IM), and has also held senior roles in licensing in digital music, as well as label and artist management.
As chief marketing officer at DMH, Neuman led marketing efforts for the company and its raft of subsidiaries, including CD Baby, Curve, FUGA, Songtrust, and Downtown’s artist & label services, publishing and neighbouring rights divisions.
Neuman, who serves on the Advisory Board for Women in Music, also led the company’s partnership with Keychange US for Music Biz 2024, following on from last year’s three-day partnership with the Tennessee Pride Chamber, where she spoke on allyship and combatting legislation.
“I think that most artists are overwhelmed by the options available,” she says. “They want distribution; they want to be on the primary DSPs, but they also want to help grow their audience; they want to help market their music when they reach a certain level; and they need music publishing administration, whether they are going to keep it in a piecemeal arrangement or it's something that we could make easier to be guided through that journey from early phase to starting to earn. That's what we have at Downtown.”
Here, we meet Neuman to chart her music industry story so far and celebrate her big win…
First off, how does it feel to win this award?
“This organisation has really been the place where I hit my stride. All of my work and the different angles that I have been on did merge, so that’s something that I feel very grateful for, even though within Downtown I've taken on some of the harder tasks, whether it's music publishing administration at scale, or, now, music distribution at scale in a wildly competitive market, where many people try to dismiss the value of our category of artists and creator. It has all come together. So, I feel very grateful, as well as proud to be receiving something like this.
“The other meaning of this recognition, being international, that has an extra level of excitement for me is I grew up going to an international school in Washington DC, so most of my friends that I've been able to stay in touch with were from all over the world. When I started playing music, the first trip I made as an artist was to London. That year, I was in two different bands [Bratmobile and Lois] and I went twice. We did three-week tours of England and Scotland. When I started working at Lookout! on the label side I started going to MIDEM in 1997 or so, and that really set me on a path of a lot of the relationships that I've been so grateful to maintain all these years.”
How do you feel about having made such an impact on your peers in the business?
“It’s very humbling. I definitely feel like there's no way that we — especially women executives in the music industry — aren't here because of a network or our confidants or the people who have tapped us on the shoulder and pushed us a little harder. Going into this industry, and especially through all the changes that have happened from physical to downloads to streaming, nobody's had a playbook. We've all had to make it up as we go along. I would say that's true for every person, not just women, but for women it's specifically more challenging because there have not been good examples of women leading companies, or even leading departments, or even running sound boards. It's not balanced, and so to find that mutual respect and mutual admiration club, if you will, within my colleagues and the people that I look to not always for advice but sometimes just for ‘What are they doing?’ ‘What can I learn from that?,’ that's been a great gift for me to have those people in my corner.”
You’ve had a unique path. You started out as the drummer in a punk band, Bratmobile, and now are a president of a global company. What is it about you or your upbring that brought you here?
“I went to college, wanting to be an actor. I changed my mind after about a week, realising I didn't really want to memorise all those lines, particularly when I started to have more feminist consciousness. I realised most of the plays were written by men too, and I was like ‘What's an alternative to that?’ And to be, at that time in a fairly political environment with the first Gulf War, the end of apartheid, trying to protect Roe in the US, the abortion rights and women's autonomy, there was a perfect storm. And being part of a punk scene, which was seeing incredible music — me and five other people sometimes watching a band or me on stage when there were five people watching us [laughs] — having gone through all of these different things, my motivation wasn't really about a pay cheque, it was not really about credit necessarily. I appreciate both those things, now especially, having gone through 30 years of a career and realising that you do have to take credit for the work you do in order to get recognised, and should also keep doors opening for other people.”
You also helped coined a genre, riot grrrl. That’s a cool legacy...
“Those of us who made the fanzine Riot Grrrl, it was such a zeitgeist of a lot of things — youthful energy, inspiration, trying to be collaborative, and with that specific artefact, it was a tool to invite other young women and girls, who were going to shows, to see if they wanted to have a meeting and talk about claiming some space. Now, when you look at the scale that the universe operates at and the speed, it was the most tactile one-to-one outreach that you could possibly have, and it is it does strike a bit of awe to think that 30 years later, it's something that has cultural relevance to the degree that it does and has sparked all of these other things.”
Will you ever return to your original passion and be in bands full-time again?
“Last year, we did play a show after about 20 years and that was pretty awesome, and we did end up playing some more this year. It’s a little bit of a challenge to balance that in between my job, and I have a family and a kid who's a tween, which is a whole different universe of responsibility, but performing has been incredibly invigorating, playing music to connect with audiences again, and new generations who didn't get a chance to see us before. That's been extremely inspiring and helpful, thinking about what we're trying to do in my work too.”
My responsibility is focusing on artists at their earliest phase of career, and their needs are changing
Molly Neuman, CD Baby
How so?
“This is a different era. There are new generations who are coming into music with every tool and every opportunity and access they could possibly have, but it's so confusing. The people who listen to music have such disconnection to how we started from that true community that was connected by the certain kind of music we play, but also the physical spaces we were in, the environment that we were in, and the messages. Now, my responsibility is focusing on artists at their earliest phase of career, and their needs are changing. So, trying to map all that together, it's actually been really helpful.”
Is there enough being done to protect the songwriter now?
“It’s a really interesting moment, where we have so much music being created by humans, let alone by new means, the paths that everybody has to create and monetise are pretty complicated. One of the places that I feel the most passionate about is that it's easy to put a qualifier on music, like, ‘Oh it comes from this partner so it can't be good’ or, ‘It comes from this partner and this A&R person, so it's inherently better,’ and I really do take exception with that. Those are definitely pieces of the historic paradigm and now when things are changing, people whose paradigm will be challenged freak out a little bit and they try to control how things work. I think that ship has sailed.
“More people than ever, and especially I look to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the new people making music in the next 20 years, are going to have a whole different inspiration to how they create, and then the infrastructure and the support that we give to them needs to evolve as well. That's exactly where I'm headed. How can we help people who just want to make music and want to see it on their platforms or want to have people they can direct to it? Maybe their ambition is pretty simple, but when you want to grow and you want to connect with an audience and have people appreciate your music, there is an infrastructure that you have to tap into. Some of it is over hundred years old like the performing rights society, and then some of it is brand new with these new platforms. So being the conduit for that in a way that's much more digestible and manageable is what I hope we can present, and then advocate for that not being a category of artists who is deemed less worthy of all of these services and opportunity, just because they don't have a certain A&R person giving them the blessing.”
What is your proudest achievement?
“When I became a mom late in life, in my first couple of years I didn’t want to talk about being a mom. I don't see male executives talking about being a dad, but when I think back on the journey and the timing, and especially what's happened over the last 10 years in my career, there's something really amazing that clicked once I became a mom.
“When I was younger, and more available, and able to get on a plane for a couple of weeks, no responsibilities, and all of that, that did give me some latitude, but then being settled, and having that even more radical sense of purpose that has happened with my daughter, has been something that I'm really proud of, because so many women struggle, it seems, with that question about what to give up, or what to sacrifice, and I am really proud that I have been able to find that, I think balance — those are words that are probably completely inaccurate, [laughs] — but there's been something that has been able to come together, and to be able to have a relationship with my family that is so strong, but also have relationships with my colleagues, and peers, and grow in this industry is something that I'm really grateful for.”
Click here for more from Women In Music 2024.
