From teenage day trader and post-production whiz kid to music-industry force, Jonathan Strauss has built a career on identifying untapped opportunities and scaling disruptive businesses. The co-founder and CEO of Create Music Group, Strauss has grown his company into a billion-dollar enterprise that operates as a record label, distributor and music-rights powerhouse. Beyond its status as one of the largest independent music companies in the world, CMG is also one of the most active investors in independent music, deploying hundreds of millions of dollars into emerging indie labels and entrepreneurs. The company recently made headlines with the signing of pop star Sevdaliza and the closing of a massive deal with deadmau5 and his mau5trap label. With a strong financial foundation and a data-driven approach, CMG continues to shape the future of music through strategic investment, rights management and artist development.
(LOS ANGELES, CA March 6, 2025) –
Where did you grow up, and what kind of influence did music have on you during your formative years?
I grew up in Palos Verdes with my co-founder, Alex Williams, whom I’ve known since middle school. I lived in a very musical house, and I would wake to my mom blasting choir music. My dad is kind of a jack of all trades, and he had a stint in music management in the ’70s. One of his artists was the guitar player from Three Dog Night, and in high school he got him to teach me guitar.
Did that set you on your path toward a career in music?
I went to UCLA for mathematics, while Alex pursued music production and became a DJ. However, my analytical skills from studying mathematics did provide a unique perspective when approaching the music industry’s challenges.
What was your time at UCLA like?
My parents had saved some money, around one year’s worth for UCLA, but they graciously put it in my bank account. This is when the whole financial crisis is beginning in 2007, and I decided to become a day trader. I took the $50,000 my parents had given me and put it in an E-trade account. Then I got a margin account, which gave me access to $200,000, and I start day trading. I turned $50,000 into a few hundred thousand in a matter of eight weeks. My rule was that I would always sell the position at the end of the day. I remember on a particular Friday, I was going skiing, and I didn’t sell my position. Luckily, it was no longer in margin, but on Monday morning Washington Mutual, my sole position, announced their bankruptcy, and I lost everything.
How do you recover from that?
I was too embarrassed to tell my parents. I had a car and sold it for $4,000. I moved out of my single dorm and moved into the shared living room of the single dorms. It was against the rules, but I couldn’t afford to pay for a dorm room, and the RAs were nice enough to look the other way.
How does an undergraduate math major suddenly recoup a $50,000 college fund?
I was super into computers. There was this camera that was just released at the time, called the RED camera, the first truly revolutionary digital video camera. The movie industry was starting to transition from film to digital because it was a lot cheaper, but the main problem with it was that no one could render the footage in a reasonable amount of time because computers weren’t built for it yet. I was doing research, and I figured out how to take different pieces of hardware, including custom graphics cards, and make them work on a Mac. Where it typically took someone days to render the footage, with this custom-made machine I could render the same footage in hours. I put an ad on Craigslist that said, “Apple Computer, render your RED footage in real time.” Six hours after I did that, someone bought it, and I made a $1,500 profit. Very quickly that business was generating $40,000-a-month in profit. I was just a freshman at UCLA. By my junior year I was making over a million dollars in annual profit, and almost every major production in Hollywood was using my computers to edit and render their films. I only hired a few employees; in fact, one of them, Peng-Xu An, is still with us 16 years later. He’s now crushing it as Create’s senior director of analytics.
How do you then transition into the music business?
Alex was working as a DJ and also at a distribution company called Label Engine. Label Engine ended up striking a deal with YouTube, and YouTube gave Label Engine access to this thing called the CMS. They gave it to Alex, and the CMS allowed you to go to any video on YouTube that was using your clients’ music and assign royalties to you if they used your work. Alex would call me about how untapped and unregulated UGC platforms were and how he thought it could be something bigger. I wasn’t necessarily looking for something new, but I was already super-passionate about the YouTube space. Alex said, “I think we should offer the CMS service directly to artists.” I said, “Let’s fucking do it!” That’s how we started the company.
How difficult was it to sell people on such a new idea?
Our pitch was super-simple: “If you sign up with us right now, we can predict how much you’re going to make, and if you don’t like us, just leave us. However, if you don’t sign up with us and you take your time, you can never get yesterday’s money from all the people who are using your music.” At the time, electronic music was a tour-heavy industry and music distribution was almost an afterthought. A lot of YouTube creators realized this and built these huge channels by using electronic music and didn’t pay the artists and copyright owners. Artists like Marshmello and deadmau5 had so much music on YouTube that was not monetized. In only six months we were already making $250,000 a month.
In the ensuing years CMG diversified a great deal. What were the first steps you took to evolve the company?
Rights management is always a necessity for maximizing our clients’ royalties. It paved the way for everything that came next. We reinvested and learned, and now over 90% of our revenue comes from record labels, publishing and worldwide distribution.
We bought Label Engine, where Alex previously worked. We became a music-distribution company and had this rights-management deal with a major label. It was great, but eventually the label came to me—and I’d probably have done the same thing—and said that they were not going to renew with us unless we did a venture with them. I made the decision not to do the venture, which meant we lost a significant amount of our profit. That experience energized me to realize the options for artists were transitioning. At that point you had major labels, self-distribution like Distrokid and then you started seeing companies like AWAL providing a kind of middle option that included label services. This was the very beginning of COVID, and we were able to secure $35 million in debt. The second we got the money, we used it to start our label-services division, which ended up changing our trajectory. We believed that by combining our owned audience, technology and funding, we could truly offer a unique product to artists.
At that point were you working in multiple genres of music?
Yes, although we started in dance and electronic music, hip-hop quickly became a core genre for us. Wayne Hampton, who’s a co-founder and now our chief business development officer, evangelized Create to the hip-hop and the R&B communities very early on. Our publishing division, which is led by Carl LeGrett, is also successful right now representing many of the top 10 charting songs on a monthly basis. Electronic is still a huge part of our company, and Thomas Garcia, who has also been with us near the beginning continues to make sure we are offering the absolute best services to the electronic music industry. Now our company has departments and labels that span the globe focusing on all genres from jazz and bossa nova to rock and Latin. A key player in this genre expansion is Mark Hill, who started in hip-hop and now leads A&R for us.
What do you think differentiates CMG and has led to its stratospheric growth?
I think we’ve been more focused than most at building an ecosystem for entrepreneurs. That has led to investing in indie labels. Artists want real partners, and we think that our combination of technology, audience and investment into independent labels that really want to grow their rosters makes us unique. Distribution has become ubiquitous, and technology is only useful when there are partners who are utilizing every element of it.
Alongside creating an ecosystem for entrepreneurs, you describe CMG as an “audience company,” which is a fairly new concept in the music business. How are you growing that side of your business?
From the beginning we saw an opportunity in the music industry and started doubling down on acquiring audience. One of the first acquisitions we made back in 2016 was a company called Flighthouse. It was the original account on musical.ly [eventually becoming TikTok] that would post sped-up songs for creators to use. Flighthouse became the main account on musical.ly where a creator would go to find to do a dance trend.
How did you expand on the early success you had with Flighthouse?
I entrusted one of our earliest employees, Ash Stahl, to run the company; she eventually became CEO. I’ve tried to keep this philosophy of encouraging our team members to build their own companies within Create. She has done this at a scale we never expected. We also bought The Nations network of YouTube channels, which has 60 million subscribers. That spawned the indie label broke, which is breaking artists on the charts week after week in the U.S., Latin America and the U.K.
What was the next step in CMG’s evolution?
The next step was recognizing the cyclical nature of the music industry—where the partnership between creatives and entrepreneurs has always been the driving force. We see Create Music Group as a platform designed for both sides to thrive.
A key example is our partnership with broke. Andre Benz and Brandon de Oliveira built the largest tastemaker brand in electronic music with Trap Nation and its sister channels, amassing over 60 million subscribers before launching their broke label. Since then, they’ve competed with major labels on a massive scale—breaking artists across Latin, R&B, indie rock and more. Today broke is doing 33+ million streams a day on Spotify, and they consistently hold the #1 and #2 songs globally on YouTube. Sevdaliza’s “Alibi” did over half a billion streams in six months on Spotify, and her new music with Latin superstar KAROL G is a perfect example of broke’s ability to sign and develop in-demand artists.
In this new music-business paradigm, why do you think indie labels are suddenly so competitive with the majors?
Major labels are great at marketing acts that have already reached stardom, and I think we’re really great at that too, but I don’t think they’re good at development, especially in many of the genre niches. Maybe the market isn’t big enough for them. If you partner with a major, you have to follow their contract, you have to get certain approvals and deal with a very specific, prescriptive structure. We’re going to help you with marketing, be your financial partner, give you the technology and make sure the artists get paid out transparently. From there, if the deals make sense, there’s really no limit. We want these labels to be successful, and we are willing to invest.
What other changes or trends do you see in the music business?
The music industry is evolving into a place where more and more you’re seeing new genres, new sounds and artists want someone with expertise in those genres. You could have the best radio team in the world, but radio stations are simply not built for the modern genres that have emerged. You would rather go to a company that has the fan base already there. Getting back to this idea of audience, we deal with labels that have a massive community on Discord, and some that have 7-10 million subscribers on Spotify playlists. Enhanced, a big trance label that we recently acquired thanks to our VP of business development, Adam Shomer, has a cult following. Even artists with relatively small followings that put out music on Enhanced often have huge success because of the label’s reputation and audience.
Tell me about your team.
We try to empower people to feel like they are the CEO of their domain. We have an absolutely incredible team, and one of things I am most proud of is that most of the divisions of our company are led by people who have been at the company since its origin. I see so many companies think they can simply grow by hiring people from competing companies instead of incubating talent. When you look at our org chart, you will find people who have been at Create since the beginning, and more common than not, at their very first job in the music industry. SVP Carl LeGrett joined Create as an intern eight years ago and now runs our publishing division along with Monique Nguyen, who runs publishing ops. Mark Hill, who has been with us for nine years, leads A&R and really developed the label services side of Create Music Group. Another key player is Darlene Hall, who leads distribution and our Label Engine product, as well as Nika Kord, who leads our product management team. Both started at the company as interns.
We also see acquisitions as a great source for talent. When we acquired Nirvana Digital, the largest rights management company in India, Manu Kaushish took over our international. And when we acquired Label Engine in our very first year in business, the founder, Richard Billis, became our CTO.
To be clear we are constantly hiring incredible people but at the same time we’re developing and investing in existing talent within the company. Zach Victor joined us nearly five years ago and was instrumental in building our finance department. Chris Herche came over from Cinematic as GM a few years ago and he’s been integral. Eric Ngyuen, who came from SOCAN, has been key for our M&A. Jaime Ponce, who built our data science team from scratch, came from Go-daddy and brought his team with him years ago. We recently went outside to find our new CFO, Will Smith. Will had never worked directly in music but had all the key attributes in the kind of exec we needed for this phase of our growth. He has worked in private equity for the last 14 years and was a paramount part of the investor group from our last funding round. I’d shout out all 400 of our team members if you let me. And, of course, I could never have done this without the support of my better half, Monica Budzyn.
Your company has a history of making smart, timely acquisitions. Can you elaborate on your strategy moving forward?
Over the last 12 months we’ve spent $200 million on acquisitions and ventures, some of which will be announced over the next eight weeks. Our company is currently at scale operating around the globe. Last year we raised our first minority round at $160 million from Flexpoint Ford, which gave us a billion-dollar-plus valuation. We’ve grown substantially since then. We plan on investing over a billion dollars into the music market over the next 36 months.
What led you to seek outside investment, as opposed to remaining bootstrapped?
It’s interesting. There are only a few bootstrapped companies at our scale—it may have only been Create and EMPIRE. We got to a certain point where the company was already so profitable, and for me, the next evolution was being able to take on financing to lean into what I enjoy most, and that is investing in entrepreneurs. If you want to invest heavily into entrepreneurs and into labels, you need more capital. I want to hopefully invest in someone who makes the next Create. That’s what makes me happy and what I find exciting. You hear people say, “Oh, the money’s not important.” Sure, the money is important, and the reason the money is important is because it allows us to create this bigger ecosystem. I want to make the barriers of entry smaller and frictionless.
The music industry has long been dominated by legacy players, and new entrants often face resistance. How do you respond to those who may push back against the changes CMG is bringing to the industry?
The reality is that real innovation always comes with resistance. The music industry has been operating a certain way for decades, and when a company like CMG comes in and challenges the status quo, not everyone is going to be happy about it.
At Create, we don’t answer to the industry—we answer to our artists and labels. They come first, and we will protect them fearlessly. Sometimes people care more about looking good than actually doing good. We focus on delivering results, ensuring our clients get what they’ve earned, and building a future where independent artists and entrepreneurs have the power they deserve.
Change isn’t always comfortable, but it’s necessary. And we are here to lead it.
About Create Music Group
Established in 2015, Create Music Group is a leading music and entertainment company. The company operates as a record label, distribution company, and entertainment network which generates over 15 billion music streams each month on DSP’s. Named #2 on the Inc 5000 Fastest Growth Companies in America in 2020, the company has grown exponentially by leveraging its owned IP with its media and technology platform. The company works with superstar artists, major and independent record labels, and global media brands. It operates a number of companies including Label Engine, one of the largest independent music distribution platforms in the world, with over 75,000 artists and 5,000 label clients; and Flighthouse, a digital entertainment brand focused on Gen Z, which has more than 300 million followers across social media. Create Music Group is based in Hollywood, CA and has 350 employees worldwide.
