Shazam has hired longtime Yahoo! executive Rich Riley as its new CEO, promoting longtime chief Andrew Fisher to the newly-created position of Executive Chairman, according to a press release. The company’s former Chairman of the Board, John Pearson, will remain on the board in a non-director capacity.
The move, according to Fisher, will allow the company more freedom to continue growing and focus on an creating an eventual IPO, which he will be working on going forward. The London-based company also recently hired Daniel Danker from the BBC as its new chief product officer.
“I couldn’t be more pleased to welcome Rich Riley as Shazam’s new Chief Executive Officer,” said Fisher in a statement. “Rich brings a tremendous amount of experience both as an Internet executive where he has rapidly scaled global businesses, to establishing strategic relationships with advertisers and partners, as well as his entrepreneurial approach and skills. Whilst Rich will run our business I will now spend more time focusing on our corporate development and future strategy including our ambitions to deliver a successful IPO for our shareholders as we look to become an increasingly important part of people’s everyday lives, helping them engage with content and brands in the most efficient way possible.”
Riley spent more than thirteen years at Yahoo!, most recently as EVP of the Americas, where he was in charge of sales, account management, ad operations, B2B marketing, and research and business development across his regions. He had previously co-founded Log-Me-On.com, which created what eventually became Yahoo!’s toolbar. The company was sold to Yahoo! in 1999. He’ll be joining a company in Shazam that boasts 300 million users — 90 million in the U.S. — with 60 million monthly active users and a new, recently-launched television service which delivers content related to individual shows. Through partnerships with both Amazon and iTunes, Shazam also claims to drive $300 million in sales for tracks tagged by their music recognition service.
“I am extraordinarily excited to be joining the Shazam team. Andrew Fisher has assembled a world-class organization that has made Shazam a global consumer brand that provides an exceptional consumer experience and has set the stage for the company’s next phase of growth,” said Riley in a statement. “I look forward to extending our dominance in media engagement, from our roots in music to our leadership position in second-screen TV and want to ensure that Shazam is the company that helps people recognize and engage with the world around them.”
Fisher had been the company’s CEO since 2005. Since Shazam’s launch in 2002, they’ve raised more than $32 million in funding from the likes of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Institutional Venture Partners, Acacia Capital and DN Capital. [Billboard.biz]
