WME NAMED MUSIC MANAGER STEPHANIE LaFERA HEAD OF ITS ELECTRONIC MUSIC DIVISION. INTERSCOPE GEFFEN A&M UPPED MICHELLE AN TO EXECUTIVE VP, HEAD OF VISUAL CREATIVE.
W
HEN CHRIS TAYLOR TALKS ABOUT
Entertainment One Music (also known
as eOne) becoming Hasbro’s new
plug-and-play music team, he sounds
like a kid in a toy store. “The amount of opportunity
that I was hoping would result from this deal is
crystallizing now,” says the global president of the
New York-, London- and Los Angeles-based music
company, speaking from a car en route to Hasbro’s
Pawtucket, R.I., headquarters. Later that day, Taylor
and a group of eOne executives met with Hasbro
management and presented a portfolio of music
assets, from music supervision and soundtrack
production to synch licensing and a production
music library, created through eOne’s $215 million
acquisition of the United Kingdom-based Audio
Network in April 2019. “Hasbro didn’t have a music
department previous to our arrival,” says Taylor. “So
we’re a really great fit.”
Hasbro’s $4 billion all-cash acquisition of eOne
— an independent studio that does business in film
and TV as well as music — closed at the end of last
year. Since then, Taylor, 54, and his music team
have begun to explore the synergistic possibilities
with its new owner. Although Hasbro is primarily
known as a toy manufacturer, it has developed some
of its more popular brands (such as G.I. Joe and
Transformers) into lucrative film and TV franchises
and is now hashing out how eOne will assist with
music for Hasbro’s upcoming My Little Pony: The
Movie and promotional materials for Dungeons &
Dragons, among other projects.
A graduate of Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law
School — Canada’s oldest — the Windsor, Ontario,
native grew up listening to Detroit
radio, founded the rock-reggae band
One, which signed to Virgin Records,
released a number of albums and
toured from the late 1980s to the mid-
1990s. In 1997, he began practicing
entertainment law (his clients included
Nelly Furtado, Sum 41, Avril Lavigne
and Drake) and in 2004 started his own
label and artist management company,
Last Gang Entertainment, where he
signed Metric, Death From Above 1979
and Crystal Castles. In 2016, Taylor
sold Last Gang to eOne and joined the
company in his current position, where
he has led the music division through
a period of aggressive expansion and
diversification that helped generate
revenue of $121 million ($37.7 million
of it from Audio Network) in fiscal year
2019, up from $69 million the previous
year. He spoke to Billboard about
eOne’s quest to become “an end-to-end
solution” for artists, companies and
people that are looking for music and
how that dovetails with its new owner’s
plans.
At this point, has eOne been tapped
for any of Hasbro’s movie franchises,
like Transformers or G.I. Joe?
We’re in discussions across the board
with respect to music needs. They are
doing a feature-length CGI-animated
My Little Pony that comes out in 2021,
and we’ve been talking about song and
composer ideas. We’ve spoken with
the Wizards of the Coast Dungeons &
Dragons team about their music needs
for trailers and commercials for their
games. Hasbro also has Cake Mix
Studios, an in-house department that
produces 100 to 150 commercials a year.
All of those commercials use music, and
we’ve been having some great discus-
sions with them about their needs.
Since you came to eOne in 2016,
you’ve emphasized diversification.
How did you manage to grow the
music division so quickly?
I was fortunate in that I joined the
music team around the time stream-
ing started to take hold. We had a No. 1
record with The Lumineers that year
“ WE SIGN [FEWER ARTISTS]...
BUT WE ROLL UP OUR
SLEEVES FOR THE ONES WE
BELIEVE IN.”
—TAYLORFROM THE DESK OF
CHRIS TAYLOR
Global President, Entertainment One Music
BY FRANK DiGIACOMO
PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAMON CASAREZ
Taylor photographed at eOne Music in Santa
Monica, Calif., on Feb. 21.
20 BILLBOARD • MARCH 14, 2020