Ledo

It wasn’t long, however, before the Dutch exec started plotting his return to the music business. “I didn’t want to start a label or a publishing company, for me that was not special enough,” he says. “So I looked around at what was going on on the horizon of the music industry.” What he saw was a fast-evolving digital market where independent artists struggle to get their songs heard amid all the noise — and where social media stars have the power to break an unknown track or artist worldwide, often overnight. The solution van Kooten came up with was Ledo, a global digital distribution platform that partners artists, producers and songwriters with social media influencers to enable both parties to reach new audiences through creative collaborations. The Amsterdam-based platform laun...