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UMPG, the second-largest publishing
company behind Sony/ATV by revenue,
oversees more than 3.5 million song copy-
rights from songwriters both nascent and
legendary, including the Bee Gees, Elton
John, Carly Simon, Bruce Springsteen,
Prince, H.E.R., Coldplay, Justin Bieber,
Jack White, SZA, Quavo, Ariana Grande,
Halsey and Harry Styles.
As buoyed as she is by UMPG’s suc-
cesses, Gerson admits she is too busy
looking ahead to appreciate how far the
company — and she herself — has come.
“My biggest flaw is that I don’t take a
moment to reflect on how amazing it is to
have accomplished this. I keep thinking
about accomplishing more,” she says,
sitting on one of two long gray sofas in
her spacious corner office at UMPG’s
Santa Monica, Calif., headquarters. “It’s
easier to have gratitude for all those other
people who do it with me than to look in
the mirror and be like, ‘Shit, girl, you’re
doing this.’ ”
Growing up in the suburbs of Philadel-
phia, Gerson attended Sunday afternoon
concerts at the Latin Casino, the Cherry
Hill, N.J., dinner theater owned by her
family where luminaries such as Frank
Sinatra, Dean Martin and Richard Pryor
performed, and Jimmy Hoffa dined.
(The long-shuttered club makes a cameo
appearance in Martin Scorsese’s The
Irishman.) “I was a real student. I had an
affinity for what makes artists tick,” she
says. “I knew [when] talent was different
than everybody else.”
After attending Northwestern Uni-
versity (“Chicago was as far west as my
father would let me go”), she got a job in
New York at Chappell Music, photocopy-
ing lead sheets and maintaining the lyric
library. She later joined EMI Music Pub-
lishing, serving as head of the company’s
East Coast division, then running the
West Coast before working at Sony/ATV
Music Publishing (after Sony/ATV’s par-
tial EMI acquisition in 2012), where she
rose to head of A&R and co-president.
There, she says, she hit a wall in terms
of advancement, just as she was coming
into her own as a boss. “I was always
driven, but I don’t know if I allowed my-
self to think about running a company,”
she says. Gerson reached out to Universal
Music Group (UMG) chairman/CEO
Lucian Grainge, who had previously
expressed interest in her: “He said, ‘Are
you ready to be the global chairman of
Universal Music Publishing?’ It was easy
for me to make excuses in my own head
of ‘I have three kids and I’m divorced,’
and ‘How am I going to do this?’ Lucian
knew I could do it before I knew I could.”
Grainge sees Gerson as one of a kind.
“One of the things I most love about Jody
is that she’s as comfortable offering a
songwriter creative advice as she is set-
ting the strategy for a global publishing
company,” Grainge says. “The biggest
mistake someone can make with Jody is
to think that simply because she exudes
humility and grace, she’s not one of the
most multidimensional, talented, and
also competitive and driven executives
you’ll ever encounter.”
On Gerson’s desk sits a nameplate that
reads “Good Vibes Only.” Nearby, a paint-
ing features the word “yes” floating above
a flower. “When I came to Universal, the
culture was a little cold, so the first thing
I did was decorate my office so it was a
place where people could feel warm and
happy,” says Gerson. Her buzzword for
UMPG’s culture is “integrity”— in the
songwriters the company signs and in its
business dealings overall.
Today, Gerson oversees 800 staffers
in 46 countries, and she has her eye on
expansion in China — UMPG opened
a Beijing office there in 2019, comple-
menting its existing offices in Shanghai
and Hong Kong — as well as India and
Latin America. She also serves on the
UMG board, and, with UMG executive
vp Michele Anthony, oversees UMG’s
development and production of film, TV
and theatrical projects. In the pipeline
are several documentaries, as well as
the new NBC musical series, Zoey’s
Extraordinary Playlist (through a deal
with Lionsgate Television). “Where
traditionally we were just licensing our
music,” she says, “in many cases, we
want to be a producer on creating the
content for it.”
Since you took over in 2015, revenue
has increased by 40%. What early
changes fueled that growth?
The first thing I did was empower our
[executive vp global administration]
John Reston to take the technology that
[UMPG] had already invested in and
make it that much better. There [had
been] more of an emphasis on admin-
istering catalogs and buying catalogs of
proven songs, so I, along with my staff,
made a bet on several unproven artists:
Shawn Mendes, Ariana Grande, Post
Malone, Halsey, Billie Eilish. We made
the right bets. I recognized we had to
have a balance of new artists as well as
signing [the Bee Gees’] Barry Gibb [and]
Bruce Springsteen, and really take a port-
folio approach to the catalog.
You’ve signed a large number of
young women artists. Is it a good time
for female songwriters, despite the
2019 Annenberg study finding that
only 12.3% of the writers of the most
popular songs over the past seven
years were female?
It’s a great time. The [stats] are getting
better. I’ve always been attracted to
strong female talent. Alicia Keys was
14 when I signed her. I have a 15-year-
old daughter. It’s very stressful today
for teenage girls, but it’s important to
have strong role models. The authentic
voice that these women are speaking
with now is really important. They’re
not playing a role anymore. They are
playing themselves. And as the world
is changing, those women are making a
profound difference.
You co-founded She Is the Music with
Alicia Keys, engineer Ann Mincieli
and WME’s Samantha Kirby Yoh in
late 2018. How much progress have
you made?
The idea was simple: How do we help
create more opportunity for women
working in music? We created the data-
base [with Billboard] with 800 vetted
women on that list so far, so if you’re
looking for a woman engineer, producer,
road manager, songwriter, there’s a
resource. We created these song camps
and the idea is this: If you put women in
a room, you’re giving them the oppor-
tunity to speak up where they maybe
weren’t comfortable speaking up in a
session with all guys. Maybe the content
of music changes. What if the song that
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104 BILLBOARD • JANUARY 25, 2020
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