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In the Contest for Content
Courtesy Sherrese Clarke Soares
Courtesy Sherrese Clarke Soares
As the founder and CEO of HarbourView Equity Partners, Sherrese Clarke Soares (MBA 2004) is establishing herself within the high-stakes contest to own the catalogs of music that attract users to social media and gaming platforms, as well as streaming options like Spotify and Apple Music.
A recent New York Times article, “A $1 Billion Competitor for Music Rights Says ‘Content Is Queen,’” explains that HarbourView is backed by up to $1 billion from Apollo Global Management, catapulting the firm into a competitive position relative to other major buyers like BMG and Hipgnosis Songs Fund, which has spent about $2 billion on the catalogs of Neil Young and Shakira.
Clarke Soares, the former CEO of Tempo Music Investments and a managing director at Morgan Stanley before that, declined to tell the Times what kind of deals she would be chasing. But she has long maintained a focus on minority artists. Her application to HBS even included a proposal for an investment platform that would support artists of color, according to the Times.
“I wanted to impact how the world saw people like me, and the fastest way to do that is through content, because it travels to places you and I can’t go with our hands and our feet,” she said.
She also suggested that she may be looking at sectors that have traditionally been undervalued. While there has been a wave of deals for the work of artists of color lately—BMG just announced an agreement for the rights to Tina Turner’s catalog, for example—white artists like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Aerosmith have fetched the highest valuations.
“We want to invest differently, not colored by preconceived notions,” Clarke Soares said. “Just because something is in the R&B sector, or in the Latin sector, we don’t believe that it should have a discount.”
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