Jason Peterson

Jason Kimball Peterson was born November 1, 1981, in Santa Barbara, California. He earned a bachelor's degree from USC's Marshall School of Business (2004) and a Juris Doctor from Pepperdine University School of Law (2007), and is a member of the California Bar. He entered digital music early in his career, signing an exclusive worldwide digital-distribution deal with rapper Master P while still a student and using it to build iTunes distribution partnerships. At 19 he produced the film *The Beat*, which premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, and he previously owned Symbolic Entertainment in Marina del Rey, producing music videos and films.

Peterson founded GoDigital Media Group (GDMG) in 2006 (with co-founders Logan Mulvey and Dave Lindsay) to address the convergence of media and technology through intellectual-property rights management. He built GDMG into a multinational conglomerate that it describes as owning nine operating businesses across three verticals — music, video networks, and consumer brands. He is credited with helping pioneer YouTube music monetization and building one of the first cloud-based digital media supply chains (the genesis of ContentBridge, created in 2010).

Today GDMG's subsidiaries include Cinq Music Group (distribution, label and publishing with ~47,000 recordings and offices from Los Angeles and New York to Mexico City, Bogotá, Medellín, Singapore, Taipei and Seoul), Beluga Heights, Sound Royalties, AdShare, GoDigital IP Funding, ContentBridge, NGLmitú, YogaWorks, and consumer-brand holdings. Peterson has stated GDMG has raised more than $1 billion to date.

He has been recognized as one of the LA Business Journal's "Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30" (2009), received the Entertainment Merchants Association's Industry Leadership Award (2014), and earned multiple Billboard / Media Play News "40 Under 40 Power Player" designations (2017–2021). He has served on the boards of Merlin, A2IM, and the Worldwide Independent Network (WIN).

• IP over operating risk: GDMG's core strategy is buying underlying copyrights — particularly music masters — as long-lived, cash-generating assets. Peterson: *"we're incredibly bullish on music, and incredibly bullish on masters."*
• Three pillars / "three C's": content (IP assets), community (networks/audience), and commerce (e-commerce/brands), which he describes as *"an infrastructure-like business with a technology-based upside."*
• Emerging markets edge: *"We have differentiated ourselves in the music industry… by working in emerging fast-growing markets around the world"* — with a strong tilt toward Latin music alongside English-language pop, R&B and hip-hop.
• Scale ambition: *"We have a vision for a billion-dollar balance sheet of music rights."*
• Prefers de-risked deals: Peterson prioritizes businesses with established revenue and proven management. He cites a losing early bet on a pre-product record label as the lesson that taught him to avoid execution risk, versus his winning acquisition of T.I.'s revenue-generating master catalog.
• On raising vs. bootstrapping: *"Venture Capital is required where you have to grow quickly and capture a market to create a sustainably defensible position. If this is not the case, then bootstrap and hold off on equity funding as long as possible so you preserve your upside as a founder."*