YouTube executive Tim Matusch has joined Warner Music Group (WMG) as executive vp of strategy & operations. The news was announced in a company memo sent last week by CEO Robert Kyncl, who worked alongside Matusch at YouTube before stepping down as chief business officer at the company to join WMG.
Matusch most recently served as managing director of strategy and business operations at YouTube, a role he held for more than two years. Prior to that, he served in senior consulting roles at Boston Consulting Group and Oliver Wyman, where he spent more than 12 years and eventually rose to partner. He also worked in senior operating roles at AOL, including general manager at AOL.com and AOL Products. He graduated from Eton College in 1996 and earned his master’s at the University of Oxford in 2001.
In the memo sent to WMG staff and obtained by Billboard, Kyncl noted that Matusch will be working closely with the greater WMG leadership team “to help define, facilitate, and execute our 5–10 year vision” while also playing a key part in “evolving” the label’s “cross-company plans, including deploying business intelligence to strengthen our decision-making, developing and tracking a set of critical KPIs, and ensuring everyone is on the same page as we build our future together.”
Acknowledging that strategy & operations is “a new function” at WMG, Kyncl continued that he’s “a firm believer in tapping into, growing, and unleashing the expertise within the company itself. That way, we’re more directly investing in ourselves, and compounding our knowledge and skills over time. It results in well organized, better informed, more realistic plans.”
Kyncl added that he worked with Matusch “across a wide variety of projects” at YouTube and has “been consistently impressed by what his team has delivered and how they did it – in a very collaborative fashion – which is particularly important to me.”
Kyncl officially assumed the role of CEO at WMG on Jan. 1, though he’ll share CEO duties with outgoing chief executive Stephen Cooper for the remainder of the month. Matusch is the first major hire announced under Kyncl’s tenure.