Orfium woos top executives
Greek startup Orfium has grown so much that it is now attracting the attention of foreign senior executives such as Universal Music Group’s former general counsel Richard Constant. He is the new chairman at the innovative Los Angeles-based firm that has developed a platform that identifies online music copyright violations.
Orfium, which employs 200 people in various countries, including 110 in Athens, grabbed Constant’s attention with its “considerable potential” and the quality of Greek graduates in the sector. “I see Orfium growing as the music business grows, developing new systems and selling those systems globally,” he states.
Rob Wells became the company’s chief executive officer in January 2018 after years of experience with BMG and Universal in Britain and the US. Then, more recently, Constant followed Wells, a former colleague, into Orfium. He tells Kathimerini: “I joined Orfium because it’s an extremely interesting company which has developed a number of useful music industry technologies and systems (in particular in the rights matching and collecting society spheres) and has the potential to continue to do so. Its CEO, Rob Wells, was a former colleague at Universal. I liked the Orfium people – smart, hard-working and caring passionately about the business they are in – and was impressed by the quality of Greek graduates in the tech sphere.”
Constant also provides Orfium with a great opportunity to gain access to people that, without him, it would struggle to: “Since leaving Universal Music I have been working in a number of music industry positions and on a number of projects. In addition to my work as chairman of Orfium, I am on the board of the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, one of the two UK publishing collecting societies. I am also on one of the UK government’s Trade Advisory Groups (Creative Industries), advising on the free trade agreements which the UK government is having to negotiate following the disaster of Brexit,” he says in clear terms, adding that “I have a number of other clients in the music industry.”
