Vice President, EMEA & Asia Pacific – Global Digital Operations – Sony Music Entertainment (London)

Matthew Hawn has been working professionally in digital media since for 17 years.

He started in San Francisco as one of the founders of Macworld Online, one of the first magazines to go online using bespoke web content management tools that were designed and deployed in almost real-time conditions. From there, he moved onto the editorial board for The Site, an hour-long primetime magazine show that ran every weeknight on MSNBC from its launch in 1996, combining news and technology stories for a general audience; Matthew sat on the editorial board for the show, creating cross-media stories that ran in parallel across television and on the web. He was also a regular on-air correspondent, covering digital entertainment.

In 1998, he crossed over from journalism to join the record industry in the earliest days of digital distribution in the dark days when the ipod was still just a glimmer in Steve Job’s eyes. He worked Universal Music International in London where he helped create the infrastructure the company needed to digitize their audio and video assets to prepare them for digital distribution. Since 2002, he’s worked for Sony Music in their Global Digital Business group in a variety of roles. Lately, he’s been developing Sony Music’s international direct-to-fan strategy, building the teams and tools to do innovative digital marketing, customer relationship management, and ecommerce.