“It’s not just cats. Y’know what it is? It’s herding cats, dogs, zebras, whales AND groundhogs. It’s way more diverse than just cats…”
Jeremy Sirota is talking about his job as CEO of indie licensing agency – a role he is stepping down from at the end of this year.
The quote above isn’t an expression of frustration or exasperation though. In a reflective pre-exit interview with Music Ally, Sirota is expressing his admiration for the diversity of the community that Merlin represents.
“You have members from all around the world. You have members of all different sizes. You have members of different levels of sophistication in the marketplace,” he says.
“You have members for whom English is not their first language. Different business types, different challenges they’re going through. Some may be more dependent on physical, some may be digital only, some may own publishing… And what they do is so fundamentally important.”
“Creativity and music drives culture, so if you don’t have it, you’re losing out as a society. And every new genre, every new way of making music, has almost always come from the independent space. This is civilisational!”
Sirota joined Merlin in January 2020 after just over two years on Meta’s music business-development team, and before that nearly nine years at Warner Music Group in business and legal affairs roles. He stepped into some big shoes: those of Merlin founder Charles Caldas.
“He was the builder and the warrior. He had to build this organisation and its membership from scratch, and then he had to fight!” says Sirota.
“He had to explain what Merlin was, over and over again, and he had to fight for that seat at the table, and to get the same rates [as majors]. And I’m simplifying here: there is so much more that he did besides that.”
The first Covid-19 lockdowns began within a couple of months of Sirota starting at Merlin, presenting him with his first challenge.
“I took over from the founder-CEO. I was a first-time CEO. And then I entered a crisis 45 days in with Covid,” he says. “There’s no textbook. There are strategies, but they don’t tell you how to make decisions. And what I learned then is that the people are everything.”
Under Sirota’s leadership, a number of Merlin’s people have been promoted, while other executives have been brought in from outside – “people who are entrepreneurs, whether that’s in their mindset or what they’ve actually done in their lives” he says.
Merlin has also launched initiatives including Merlin Engage, providing mentorship for female leaders in the industry, and Merlin Connect, forging partnerships with emerging startups.
“It’s VUCA: the four horsemen of of the upheaval apocalypse!”
Jeremy Sirota
If Caldas was the builder and warrior, Sirota characterises himself as “the innovator and moderniser” who piloted Merlin’s next phase, including nurturing that entrepreneurial culture.
“We’ve hired for being culturally additive: people who strategically challenge you. You want ideas coming from the bottom. You want to remove layers of bureaucracy. And you want to let people know that their ideas are welcome,” he says.
“They’re not there to make their bosses happy; they’re there to further the mission. And of course, you can say all those things, but you can’t just say them…”
You have to do them, all while ensuring that diverse community of cats, dogs, zebras, whales and groundhogs are on board with your plans at a time of renewed disruption for the music industry – the independent sector included.
Sirota recently learned a new acronym: VUCA. Well, new to him – it was originally coined by the U.S. Army War College in the 1980s to describe the changing nature of warfare. VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, and Sirota thinks that’s an apt description of the music industry’s recent history.
“For the last 20 years, the word that comes to mind is not disruption. It’s upheaval,” he says. “It’s VUCA: the four horsemen of of the upheaval apocalypse! Our members look at the world and think: why is it every time we get to another settling point, something else comes in and tries to sweep away what they do, and the skills that they bring?”
In 2025, the sweeper is AI, and Sirota has plenty of views on that – fuelled by Merlin’s recent announcement of its first licensing deal with an AI company, ElevenLabs.
Announced in early August, the partnership is for the company’s new Eleven Music tool. Although the initial model is trained on production music, a new ‘Pro’ version slated for release in the coming months will be trained on music via deals with Merlin and publisher Kobalt.
“Right now, we’re in the blender when it comes to AI. We’re being shaken about, and we’re all a little on tilt because of that,” says Sirota of the wider industry sentiment.
“There are massive challenges that need to be addressed. To use music to train a model without permission is copyright infringement, and no one should be doing that. That’s just simple. I don’t even know why that’s still open for debate!”
The ElevenLabs deal started as a carefully-constrained pilot in 2024: “They weren’t sure about what they wanted to do. We weren’t sure about them. It was a little bit try-before-you-buy,” he says.
“But what we told our members was this: it’s a great way to experiment, it’s safe, and it’s someone that we believe is on the right side of history and could be the right partner for us. You don’t get to play the game unless you’re on the field! How can you develop a strategy unless you start to experiment?”
Sirota says that the pilot showed ElevenLabs had the right philosophy and mindset, as well as respect for creatives.
“And it’s additive to the creative industry,” he continues. “We found the right guardrails. Everything that we deemed non-negotiable, we achieved in this deal, because we found the right partner to work with.”
While the deal was reported in the music-industry press, Sirota is surprised that it didn’t make bigger waves. He thinks it has wider significance: proving that this kind of licensing deal CAN be done – despite claims by some AI companies and their investors that music licensing is too complex and/or that rightsholders are too difficult to deal with.
“If Merlin can achieve a groundbreaking deal with ElevenLabs – a company backed by Andreessen Horowitz, no less! – to license music in a way that they can accept and work with, then it is possible to do it. Period. It’s proven to the world,” he says.
Sirota also suggests that the deal is evidence that the independent sector may be able to move faster to license AI models than the major labels.
“For some of the biggest players, their concern is that unless everything can be controlled, they don’t want to license,” he says.
“My view is if you find the right partner with the right mindset, and you have the right overlapping business interests and the incentive structure is right, you can achieve that. But for some others in the space, all they see is downside. or risk, and they can’t get past that to think about the upside.”
“Boring is bad? Well, I say I’m going to make operational rigour sexy again!”
Jeremy Sirota
AI and music is about more than ‘AI music’ though. Sirota is just as excited about how AI technologies might help independent labels in other ways.
AI to handle the routine admin side of music-industry workflows may not make as many headlines as the glamorous (but controversial) GenAI issues, but Sirota thinks the former deserves more attention.
“I once heard [journalist and researcher] Cherie Hu say ‘boring is bad’. Well, I say I’m going to make operational rigour sexy again!” he laughs, before deploying a restaurant metaphor to explain why.
“You could have the greatest food, the greatest staff, the greatest marketing, but if you don’t reduce the cost to wash linens by 50%, that’s the difference between profitable and unprofitable,” he says.
“We need to automate more. We need to make a process for this and apply technology against this more… I don’t know exactly how this is going to work, but there’s going to be a future model that is a step-function leap in how we operate.”
“When I think about AI and the tooling and what it brings, I see a world where it is really beneficial to independent labels and how they work with art.”
He doesn’t mean that they’ll be creating AI musicians. It’s more about the workflows.
“There’s something you can start to nibble at around how it empowers creativity. How you can better control costs so you can take greater risks,” he says. “I can’t quite put my finger on it yet, but I feel this breakthrough moment coming, and it’s going to happen within the independent space.”
Is that not going to lead to mass redundancies at independent music firms when the AIs start doing people’s jobs? Sirota says not, pointing to Merlin’s development of an AI chatbot for member inquiries as an example.
“The whole point of that is to empower you. It’s freeing you up to do the human stuff that matters so much more. The phone calls, the visits, the space to think more pro-actively, to zoom out and think about how we engage members better. There’s no AI tool or agent to do that yet,” he says.
“Look, I’m leaving, but if I was continuing, I don’t see the need to fire anyone at our company. Every single one of them, AI can free them up more. Their time can be spent on way more valuable stuff than just ‘oh man, we didn’t get the daily delivery in the right format from Spotify, and now we’ve got to go back and fix it’.”
“I do not need another AI or tech overlord talking to us about how they want to live to 500 and fly us to Mars”
Jeremy Sirota
As for GenAI music, Sirota hopes that the ElevenLabs deal will support the wider music industry’s efforts to persuade policymakers to regulate AI in a copyright-friendly way. He’s spikily entertaining about the AI and tech moguls who are on the other side of this lobbying battle.
“I do not need another AI or tech overlord talking to us about how they want to live to 500 and fly us to Mars!” he says, before segueing into the bigger regulatory questions.
“One of the biggest mistakes society has made, probably in its history, is deciding that technology was different, and that the normal rules of how we regulate everything else, and how we treat every other industry, don’t apply to it,” he says.
“What you’re seeing now is that tension continuing to assert itself, and it ebbs and flows as different types of governments with different philosophies come in.”
Talking of regulation inevitably brings the conversation round to another current battle: UMG-owned Virgin Music Group’s attempt to buy Downtown Music Holdings, and the efforts of various independent bodies and labels to persuade regulators to block it.
Sirota has views, but he chooses his words carefully, noting that he still has plenty of friends at major labels whose passion for music he respects.
“But companies want to make more money, right? That’s what a company tries to do. And in a world where you have consolidation, the concern is that it can create – I’m not saying it does, but it can create – market-distorting actions in the marketplace, and that is the concern,” he says.
Some of the rhetoric from UMG’s side of this battle has pushed back at the idea that independent labels are united in their opposition to the deal – suggesting that bodies like Impala and WIN don’t speak for everyone.
That could be seen as an attempt to fragment the independent sector? One that comes not long after TikTok decided not to renew its licensing deal with Merlin, preferring instead to license labels individually. More fragmentation.
Right from the start, Merlin was about collective power: negotiating deals on behalf of its members to give them parity with the majors. In 2025, is that collective power under threat? Sirota challenges the theory in several ways.
“The whole point of independence is they make independent decisions. They’ve always done that. This is why they do what they do and run what they run. So the idea that they would always all agree with each other, it’s never existed!” he says.
“I don’t normally blast figures out, but let’s talk figures. The revenues [for Merlin members] increase by 17% year-over-year. That is clearly over-indexing against the market. And keep in mind that every year or two, one – if not two – of our largest members are acquired. So that 17% is not really 17%: it could be closer to 30% even.”
“So any time someone says ‘Oh, this is the end of Merlin: TikTok disaggregated you and took you apart…’ Well, they did the same thing to Universal and they did the same thing to the NMPA. We just have less tools in our arsenal to fight this. But then we come back,” he adds.
“We closed our Spotify deal a couple of months ago, and I would say it’s the strongest the partnership has been since I got here. We just closed a groundbreaking deal – just us – with the leading AI company.”
“You want a strong Merlin. The marketplace needs a strong Merlin. And one of my core goals over this year was to ensure that Merlin is as strong as possible for whoever takes over.”
“I never wanted Merlin to be an indie representing indies. I wanted it to be a global powerhouse!”
Jeremy sirota
Which begs one obvious question. Who IS going to take over? By a quirk of fate, every time Music Ally has met up with Sirota before, a Big Industry Job has been vacant, and he’s been a reliable source of shrewd guesses about who, say, the next IFPI boss or Warner Music CEO might be.
It’s unfair to turn the tables now: who the next Merlin CEO should be is a matter for the company’s board, and Sirota is in no mood to step on their toes by giving his opinions publicly. However, he does have something to say about the potential skillsets required to follow a builder/warrior founding CEO and then an innovator/moderniser successor.
“I’d say optimiser and relationship builder. Not because I didn’t do those things, but there’s only 24 hours in the day and I’m told you’re supposed to use six of them to sleep!” he says.
“I hope I’m leaving this organisation in a way that someone can come in and say ‘Man, this shit just runs!’ They’ll just need to provide some course corrections to optimise how that works and deliver more value.”
Which, he hopes, will then give them time to focus on the relationship-building side of the job.
“I’m not just talking about the members. How do you spend more time with the trade associations? How do you spend more time with the partners? How do you spend more time throughout the industry?” he says.
“I never wanted Merlin to be [just] an indie representing indies. I wanted it to be a global powerhouse! So it’s about expanding into conversations with people we were never talking to before.”