Supporting the entrepreneurs transforming the music, live and fandom business.

Ahdritz + Co. Inc. advises and invests in entrepreneurs with the vision to transform their industry, using technology to scale and succeed. It was launched in 2023 by Willard Ahdritz, founder and chairman of Kobalt Music Group Ltd

Making a difference takes time, so a long-term partnership is often required. Every entrepreneur and their company has their own key issues and decisions to grapple with when formulating a lasting strategy that works for all stakeholders.

As a founder-turned-investor with a track record of building highly successful global companies, Willard looks for opportunities where his hard-won experience and insights can be leveraged for genuine impact. Each company is carefully selected on this basis, and each engagement comes with access to the advice, expertise, and network of Willard and his team.

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Throughout his career as a founder and investor, Willard has been driven by the desire to use entrepreneurship and technology for positive impact. Having seen first-hand the unfairness of the music industry’s standard practices, he set out to put in place a fairer deal for creators. This same desire lies behind his investments today.

There now exists a significantly bigger challenge and opportunity to support companies that generate positive global impact as well as financial returns.

Norrsken is an impact ecosystem where entrepreneurs can find everything they need to make saving the world their business. Its work stems from a belief in entrepreneurship and new technology as forces that can positively impact the world. Norrsken is a non-profit, non-partisan and non-religious foundation. It was founded by Niklas Adalberth, co-founder of payment services unicorn Klarna.

Willard mentors companies on the roster of the Norrsken Foundation, a leading programme based in Stockholm for impact-focused startups, and is on the advisory board of Norrsken22, a growth fund backing tech startups in Africa. He has invested in several funds operated by Norrsken.

Norrsken investors are moved by the belief that time is running out to solve the biggest challenges facing humanity today, from the climate crisis to global economic inequality. As a result, their investments focus on sectors including decarbonization, electrification, clean energy, healthcare, sustainable food production, and education. Willard and his counterparts at Norrsken also endeavor to support entrepreneurs in emerging markets, where sustainable economic growth and job creation can be generated in areas where it is most needed.

Willard remains inspired by the positive difference that committed, ethically minded investing can make.

Impact

amra is the first of its kind — a global digital music collection society, built on technology and trust. amra is designed to maximize value for songwriters and publishers in today's digital age, while providing the highest level of transparency and efficiency.

amra

Reinventing ticketing to create the best live events possible.

DICE is ticketing as it should be: no booking fees, no touts and an easy-to-use platform. Like many of the most innovative companies, DICE was created as a solution to a problem that most people assumed couldn’t be solved — in this case the inevitable hidden costs and over-reliance on scalpers that buying tickets for gigs often involved. By developing a mobile-only platform with up-front pricing and a ‘waiting list’ feature where fans can buy returned tickets to sold-out events without having to rely on touts, they have achieved the improbable: a ticketing company that music fans actually like.

DICE is also a music discovery platform, with users receiving personalized event recommendations, and helps artists and venues better understand and grow their audiences via sophisticated data insights. By offering this kind of value to fans, venues and artists, the company is going from strength to strength and continues to grow internationally.

“We’ve always believed that a gig can change lives. So we created a platform for fans to experience more of the shows they love in the most hassle-free way possible.” —Phil Hutcheon, founder and CEO, DICE

DICE

Music publishing that puts creators first.

Kobalt is a music publishing company providing faster, fairer and more transparent royalty payments for creators. The traditional payments model hadn’t served songwriters well, with an antiquated system meaning that payments took too long to be processed, creators were left in the dark as to what they’d earned, and money owed to them continually slipped through the net. 

Founded at the turn of the twentieth century, Kobalt capitalized on the music industry’s digital revolution to develop a tech-driven platform which solves these problems, and which allows artists to track rights ownership and royalties in real time. Through the data collected by Kobalt, creators can also gain advanced insights on how, where and when their music is played. Involving a more equal split of royalty payments, fairer contracts and creators retaining control of copyrights, Kobalt’s is a genuinely artist-first offering in an industry where this has often been a rarity.

In 2015 Kobalt acquired AMRA (the American Mechanical Rights Agency) to maximize even more value for creators. AMRA has since gone from a small, domestic company into a global collections society tailor-made for the digital age, collecting royalties in over 200 countries with a single centralized model.

“There’s always an opportunity to exchange views and benefit from his experience as the founder of the company, but also as a great observer of the industry. If you think about Willard and the way he’s transformed the business, he has shown a great ability to anticipate where the industry is going.” —Laurent Hubert, CEO, Kobalt

Kobalt Music

Background music for business that wants it all.

Soundtrack Your Brand is a global music streaming service that caters specifically to businesses. For years, the B2B market has lagged behind the consumer market in the streaming world, with established streaming services only licensed for personal, rather than commercial, use. Soundtrack Your Brand’s all-in-one solution combines expert curation and world-class technology to offer a simple, powerful and legal way to stream music in commercial environments, while ensuring that artists receive the compensation they deserve for having their music played.

Using cutting-edge AI, their service enables business owners to select the perfect background music for their brand and drive better relationships with their customers. And, by using technology to better track where and when music is played, the company has opened up an untapped source of royalty payments for musicians. Closing the gap between the B2C and B2B music streaming markets, their mission is to kill bad background music and to soundtrack every brand in the world.

“Soundtrack Your Brand was created with the ambition to move the antiquated background music market into the streaming era, bringing transparency, compliance, and fair compensation and correct flow of royalties to artists and composers when their music is played in a public or commercial environment. We are taking the music streaming revolution that happened in the consumer space to the B2B sector. We are upgrading a broken legacy model and combining streaming with enhanced proprietary technology, and in doing so, unlocking a multi-billion dollar market for the music industry. We want to increase royalties to artists and songwriters and ensure that they are paid when their music is played.” — Ola Sars, co-founder, CEO and Chairman, Soundtrack Your Brand

Soundtrack Your Brand

Sweet is an NFT marketplace and Web3 platform connecting fans with artists, brands and sports teams. They help their partners — currently including teams from the NBA, NHL and Formula One — to develop and sell digital collectibles while simplifying the complex world of blockchain technology for the consumer. Their platform requires no specialist knowledge from the buyer and makes it just as easy to own an NFT as a t-shirt, bringing the collectible market into the digital space and allowing brands to drive engagement and expand their potential market.

“The future of rare, collectible merchandise is in the digital arena, as evidenced by the growing interest in NFTs, and we are thrilled to be the ones giving brands and artists a new way to offer exclusive digital merchandise to their fans and customers.” —Tom Mizzone, founder and CEO, Sweet

Sweet

A game-changing marketing tool for musicians.

With a pioneering approach to data-led music marketing, un:hurd music helps independent artists to close the gap on the major labels. Their platform analyzes artists’ data and turns it into smart, tailored marketing strategies. This enables artists to cut through in a crowded arena, without the need for the kind of huge marketing budgets to which few have access.

“Willard forever changed the industry as it’s known today when he pioneered music as an asset class and built the world’s largest indie publishing and artist-first record label… No-one today is better placed to understand the value of new music technology, putting artists first and leading with transparency.” —Alex Brees, founder and CEO, un:hurd music

un:hurd music

Investments made by Ahdritz & Co. Inc. and by Willard Ahdritz and his affiliates.

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A founder and investor with a history of industry disruption.

“It’s safe to say that the music industry as we know it today was uniquely shaped by the pioneering mind of Willard Ahdritz. His foresight regarding the coming changes in the marketplace combined with his ability to reimagine standard practices has been a dynamite recipe for commercial success. For these reasons and more, we’re honored to present Willard with Music Biz’s Innovator Award.” — Portia Sabin, President, Music Business Association

Willard started out as a musician and the founder of Telegram Records and Publishing, which put Stockholm on the international music map. After completing his MBA, he spent seven years at L.E.K. Consulting in London, where formulating strategies and M&A execution gave him the tools for approaching problems with an analytical mindset.

After seeing the impact of the internet and digital distribution on music, Willard saw an opportunity to return to the industry and had a vision for how it could be transformed. He established Kobalt in 2001, pioneering the use of technology in music publishing by creating a global centralized organization supported by a platform that streamlines royalty collections. These innovations helped to reshape the industry and establish a fairer deal for creators.

Kobalt Neighbouring Rights, the largest NR agency representing 40% of the top 1000 artists, and AWAL, which introduced MaaS for artists, operated as Kobalt’s recorded music division before being sold to Sony Music Entertainment in 2021 for $430 million. In 2010, Willard founded Kobalt Capital, the first regulated music royalty fund, which effectively introduced music royalties as an asset class for family offices and institutional investors. Fund 1 was sold to Hipgnosis in Oct 2020 for $323 million and Fund 2 was sold in Oct 2021 for $1.1 billion to KKR/Hendel.

Under Willard’s leadership, Kobalt grew into one of the top three global music publishers, while its transparent, data-driven model has fundamentally changed how the business operates. Kobalt estimates that its model has so far earned over $10 billion extra for its creators, by collecting more in royalties and allowing them to retain ownership of the rights to their work.

In October 2022, Kobalt selected Francisco Partners to acquire a majority stake to invest in the company’s next phase, further support the global digital collection society AMRA, enrich its technological innovation, and expand Kobalt’s footprint as the leading independent global music publisher. Today Willard remains an active chairman of Kobalt, while looking to build on this work as an investor and advisor to younger companies — drawing on his passion and experience to work with entrepreneurs who have transformative potential and who are motivated by making the music industry fairer and more transparent.