Tom Kershaw, SVP and CTO at BMI, shares how a career spanning telecom, ad tech, travel, and now music rights taught him to learn new industries fast and lead through transformation. He breaks down the massive data challenge of tracking billions of music performances, the open source story behind Prebid that led to Google's antitrust trial, and why trying to stop AI in music is a losing battle.
Main Topics Covered:
Crossing industries from telecom to ad tech to music rights, and why going deep on one thing (not everything) is the fastest way to learn a new business
The Prebid open source story: uniting competing ad tech companies against Google's walled gardens, and testifying in the DOJ antitrust trial
How BMI tracks billions of music performances across streaming, live venues, TikTok, and elevators to pay 1.5 million songwriters
Solving two data problems at once: high-complexity structured ownership data (SQL) and high-scale streaming counts (Kafka, Databricks, Spark)
Why AI in music can't be stopped, how songwriters already use it, and the ethical frameworks BMI is building around opt-in and attribution
Transformation leadership: why "focus" literally means "no," and the willingness to fail and course correct is the only way through
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