An interview with Billboard’s 2022 Power 100 Woman Sherrese Clarke Soares took over five months. The certified boss lady with a billion dollar budget to buy music catalogues is the co-founder and CEO of HarbourView Private Equity Partners, a company named after her Grandmother’s community in Jamaica, where she visited as a child for summers and holidays.
From a family of small means, her story is not uncommon among Jamaicans who migrate to find a better life but Sherrese proudly honors that uprbinging in her professional undertakings. “I saw the struggle, my Grandmother came to the United States and scrubbed floors to pave the way and sponsor her children to come up and build a life here. In Jamaica, my Grandfather pushed an ice cart to send his daughter to college in Europe and Canada, to be educated, to be the first person to work in a bank, to work on Wall Street and all of that is the culmination of why I really felt like it was important for me to keep that center of what we are doing,” Soares says.
The career financier is backed by Apollo Global Management along with other investors looking to reap long term benefits as music becomes a viable asset class.
“The goal for HarbourView is to be a Private Equity enhancement management firm, focus on the things I know well, which is finance and culture,” Sherrese shares convincingly.
For the last three years music catalogues, publishing, image and likeness acquisitions have taken up the pages of every financial media publication, as the commercial value of intellectual property becomes a hot commodity on Wall Street due to lowered interest rates during the Trump administration.
Big acquisitive players include the major labels, Blackstone, KKR and Hipgnosis in the U.K raised more than £1bn to buy up catalogues from artists including Neil Young.
Even the Church Of England CCLA has become an investor in the catalogues of artists all over Europe and America.
Other artists like Iggy Azalea, Justin Bieber, John Legend, Tina Turner, Neil Diamond, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Stevie Nicks, Justin Timberlake and more have sold their life’s work for eye-popping sums of money: The James Brown Estate reportedly walked away with $90 million from Primary Wave after a fifteen year contentious internal battle.
HarbourView’s slogan is “Content Is Queen” and their current portfolio includes Despacito, YouTube’s most viewed song which is the subject of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Central District Court by 80s dancehall pioneer producers Steely & Clevie. A topic Sherrese stayed away from during our 30 minute discussion on zoom, but her company acquired the rights for the song after buying singer/songwriter Luis Fonsi’s catalogue for a reported $100 million, a figure she told WMV that was neither confirmed or denied.
Usher’s share of Justin Bieber‘s catalogue was also snatched up by Harbourview for a reported US$40 million dollars.
With several power moves under her belt, Soares was also named one of Billboard’s Change Agents for 2021, while she was CEO/founder of Tempo Music.
“I grew up as a first generation American in Queens, New York,” she says. “I grew up in Rosedale Queens, my parents migrated to the United States in the early 70s, so I grew up in the New York area, and I know that makes me a fake Jamaican to many of you who believe that unless you are born in Jamaica (you are not Jamaican), but I did grow up with very heavy influence of Jamaican culture in my life. I also grew up going back every summer, multiple times a year” Soares explains.
“HarbourView’s story is a journeyed one, but a destined one. My dad was an entrepreneur, so growing up watching my dad be an entrepreneur in real estate in Queens was something that really inspired me to be thoughtful about how I can be impactful, how can I lead,” Sherrese told WMV with a distinct New York accent.
The Queen of content has a penchant for taking calculated risks based on what will give the highest return and is not afraid of change, a fact she says is the foundational principle of Harbourview.
“I grew up in finance, I grew up working on Wall Street, working at Morgan Stanley for the better part of two decades for decades but as times progressed opportunities presented itself for me to really launch out on my own and so without giving all of the puts and takes I just really have an eye t keep the designation front and center even though the journey may be storied or change and shift overtime so that as opportunities present itself you can grab it which was the case in my story,” she explained.
“I credit my parents and my mom who took me to piano lessons every week for about 15 years of my life. Culture was always a very big and strong part of what I did, we went to see Alvin Ailey, Oliver Samuels was a big thing growing up, so culture was always a heartbeat for me, it was almost like I minored in the arts and education when I went to college, but I really loved who I could be to culture, I really always wanted to be fuel.”
With the money to explore and impact culture the New Jersey resident says, “it wasn’t really my ministry to be in-front of the camera, it was really my destiny to be fuel, one of the things I drive in is, being thoughtful about how to strategically build things and do things.”
Watch the full interview on YouTube below:
