Billboard: Revealed Billboard’s 2022 Women In Music Top Executives

Reservoir Media CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi leads this year's list of high-achieving women from every sector of the industry — including 12 Hall of Fame honorees.

On Aug. 30, 2021, Reservoir Media CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi and rapper Offset laughed as they rang the opening bell at NASDAQ’s Marketsite Studio in New York.

As confetti — in Reservoir (and NASDAQ) blue — fluttered around them, Khosrowshahi soaked in the initial moments of becoming the first female founder and chief executive of a publicly traded independent music company.

“It was a true moment of arrival,” she recalls.

Although the presence of Offset, who signed with Reservoir in 2017, and a very pregnant Cardi B may have looked like a contrived photo op, Khosrowshahi says the Migos member had asked to attend the ceremony. “It just came up in conversation, and he told me he wanted to be there,” she recalls. And though she admits she was skeptical that he would show, she says the husband-and-wife hip-hop duo arrived at the NASDAQ studio fashionably dressed and precisely on time and continued celebrating with the Reservoir team that day.

Reservoir is one of several independent music rights holders — among them Hipgnosis Songs Fund, Round Hill Music Royalty Fund and One Media iP Group — that have gone public within the last few years, but, unlike her predecessors, Khosrowshahi chose to launch her company’s initial public offering stateside instead of on the London Stock Exchange. “It’s a finite universe as far as the investor base goes,” she says of the London exchange. With the field there already crowded and a reverse merger with the Roth CH Acquisition II special purpose acquisition company bringing $115 million to the offering, choosing NASDAQ “made a lot of sense.”

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