The Daily Swarm

Billboard.biz: Zubillaga Splits With WMG:

Warner Music Group executive VP, digital strategy and business development Alejandro (Alex) Zubillaga, will leave the company June 1 to “pursue entrepreneurial activities in media and other businesses,” the music giant said today.

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Since joining WMG in March 2004, Zubillaga has spearheaded a number of groundbreaking deals in the mobile and online music spaces, including a pact with Verizon Wireless in January 2005 to sell mobile music video downloads that was among the first U.S. deals of its kind.

N.Y.-based Zubillaga was central to a multi-territory, cross-platform “triple play” agreement with France Telecom in May 2005 that made WMG content available to more than 110 million subscribers in 12 countries, and was the architect of a number of deals to expand WMG‘s presence in international markets, including South Korea and South Africa.

Prior to joining WMG, Zubillaga was co-founder and managing director of WMG-investor Lexa Partners, a venture capital group, and before that was founder and managing partner of E-Quest Partners, a venture capital firm focused on investments in Latin America.

“Alex has brought a non-traditional approach to the music business based on his history as a venture capitalist and in building a successful media company,” Bronfman said in a statement. “Most of all, his talent, imagination and enthusiasm, have been critical in enabling WMG develop its aggressive, industry-leading digital strategy. We are sad to see Alex leave but we wish him all the best in his next endeavors.”

CNN: Warner Music the Remix:

Then, to ensure that all of Warner’s labels were on the same digital page, Bronfman created a position that would oversee all recorded music in the United States. He filled it with a giant in the business: Lyor Cohen, an entrepreneurial whiz who began his career as a road manager for Run DMC and went on to head what’s now Universal Island Def Jam. Bronfman also hired his investment partner and brother-in-law, Alex Zubillaga, to run Warner’s digital strategy team. Zubillaga, who in the mid-‘90s built a cable company called Netono in Venezuela, came with no music industry experience, something Cohen calls a blessing in an industry that’s “stuck on stupid.”

While Zubillaga comes free of bad habits, Cohen comes with loads of respect throughout the industry. And they have drilled the digital message into all levels of the company. In October 2004 they brought the company’s 50 or so A&R execs together for a first-of-its-kind gathering to teach them, as Cohen puts it, to stop thinking of themselves as “sonic Indiana Joneses” and instead seek all sorts of extra material for various digital outlets.

They even showed up unannounced at a video shoot for Rob Thomas’s “Lonely No More” to do some hands-on evangelizing. Cohen and Zubillaga were going to a dinner in Los Angeles one evening in February 2005 when, to Zubillaga’s surprise, Cohen instructed the driver to head to the set. The two execs chatted folks up, then pulled the director aside, turned the camera on him, and asked him about the video. They interviewed the manager and the women dancing. They asked Thomas about cell phones. It was the sort of behind-the-scenes material that doesn’t automatically get shot but that Cohen and Zubillaga want the troops to see as a critical part of every music video. “You can come up with an idea, but you’ve got to take it down to the people,” Cohen says.