Bio : Seeker Music
Short Bio
Founded by M&G Investments and led by CEO and award-winning songwriter Evan Bogart (“Halo”), Seeker Music has taken a creator-first, creator-led approach to records, rights management, and music publishing since it was established in 2020. Their over 15,000+ copyright-strong catalog includes everything from the work of Joan Jett, Christopher Cross, Run The Jewels, Jon Bellion, and Charlotte Caffey (of the Go-Go’s), to Mozella (“Wrecking Ball”), John Ryan (One Direction), Plested (Lewis Capaldi), Mark Morrison (“Return Of The Mack”), Future Cut (Lily Allen), Jay Sean (“Down”) and J-Kwon’s “Tipsy,” which has been interpolated into the longest-running Billboard #1 song of all time, the GRAMMY-nominated “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” and many more.
Seeker was recently named #2 on Fast Company’s list of Most Innovative Music Companies 2025. Alongside Bogart, the company is led by an executive team consisting of Chief Financial Officer Todd von Mende, Chief Rights and Royalties Officer Jennifer Blakeman, Chief Creative Officer Steven Melrose, and General Counsel Dan Stuart, and works with a Board chaired by John Smith (BBC, Burberry), representing key investors M&G Investments.
Long Bio
When Seeker Music CEO Evan Bogart talks about his experience with other publishing companies, he’s not just speaking as a competitor. He’s also speaking as a creator, a chart-topping songwriter who cowrote worldwide #1 “S.O.S.” for Rihanna and the GRAMMY-Award Winning “Halo” for Beyoncé, alongside notable songs for Lizzo, Madonna, Britney Spears, and countless others. And he’s speaking as an industry vet who’s worked for, and alongside, record labels, management companies and publishing companies in his equally successful career on the business side, where he helped develop the likes of Eminem, OneRepublic, and Maroon 5.
Through all of it, he’s come away dissatisfied with music “business as usual.”
“Most publishing companies are in either the market share game or the quantity game,” Bogart says. “They sign as many things as they can and hope that one or two things foot the bill. They hoard catalogs and operate as sync-farms. And the only time they ever pay attention to their songwriters is when they're trying to sign them, when they have a hit, or when their deal is coming up for renewal.”
With Seeker, Bogart is bucking those trends by building a company creators will implicitly trust - because there’s a creator running the show.
Founded in 2020 by M&G Investments in Los Angeles – where Seeker operates a full-service studio and creative campus - Seeker brings that creator’s perspective to the worlds of music publishing, records, and rights management. After just four years in business, the company’s catalog boasts more than 15,000 copyrights and master recordings, including classic copyrights performed across several decades, from the likes of punk rock royalty Joan Jett and 80’s legends The Go-Go’s and Christopher Cross (whose catalog Seeker has brought to all-time streaming highs), to nostalgic 90’s and 00’s chart-toppers like DMX, Nelly, SWV, 2Pac and Destiny’s Child, to today’s A-list stars such as Drake, Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, Eminem, Harry Styles and Rihanna, to name a few. That a new, independent company has developed a catalog like that, that quickly, is thanks in part to the visionary approach the team takes to catalog acquisition and marketing: “We treat every catalog like it's a brand new artist/writer/producer that we just signed,” Bogart says. “Because you know what? It’s new and exciting for us.”
It’s that attitude, and Bogart’s deep understanding of songs and the people who manifest them, that has led revered artists and songwriters from Jett, Cross, Charlotte Caffey, and Run the Jewels to iconic songwriters such as Mozella (“Wrecking Ball”), Brian Alexander Morgan (SWV’s “Weak” & “I’m So Into You”), Sam Watters (Color Me Badd, Jordin Sparks’ “Battlefield”), John Ryan (One Direction, Maroon 5, John Legend) and Jon Bellion (Miley Cyrus, Camilla Camello, Eminem), to trust their catalogs with the young company that has now acquired them.
On a global level, Seeker has forged partnerships with the Danish music publishing, management and creative licensing company Tigerspring, whose clients include fast-rising Swedish alt-electro duo Roya, and hitmakers Sylvester “Sly” Sivestren (Maneskin “SUPERMODEL”, Dua Lipa “We’re Good”) and Tommy Baxter (Ritual, Dua Lipa, 6lack); helped organize songwriting camps throughout Europe; signed international hitmakers such as Nea from Sweden and the Panamanian singer-songwriter Sofía Valdés, and put a major focus on catalogs with international reach, such as Mark Morrison’s (“Return of the Mack”), The Wombats, Future Cut (Lily Allen), and many more.
And they’ve made strategic acquisitions from boutique publishing houses across genres, from a large share of Nashville’s country-focused Combustion, including 70 #1s, to select writers in UK’s hip-hop-leaning Notting Hill. Last year, one of the cuts acquired in the deal with Notting Hill - J-Kwon’s “Tipsy” - was interpolated into the biggest song of the year and the longest-running Billboard #1 of all time, Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” proving the value of a songwriter’s ear in the catalog acquisition process.
The success of “A Bar Song” also coincided with the launch of Seeker’s innovative Samplémoose platform — a collection of pre-cleared stems, beats, loops and already-started "flips" curated by the Seeker creative team and readymade to be shared with producers and songwriters. In April of 2024, Seeker acquired the catalog of GRAMMY-nominated producer Marcos “Kosine” Palacios, whose credits include “Anaconda” by Nicki Minaj and “Birthday Cake” by Rihanna, and named him the first Samplémoose Ambassador, in a partnership that emphasizes Seeker’s continued effort to transform existing IP into tomorrow’s next big hit. Seeker’s work on Samplémoose and drive to amplify their IP in new and fresh ways earned the company the #2 spot on this year’s Fast Company Most Innovative Music Companies list.
Bogart landed his earliest record-label gig at 16, but in some sense he’s been in the music industry since he was born. His dad was legendary record executive Neil Bogart (whose last #1 record he released, “I Love Rock N Roll,” is now part of the Seeker catalog as part of a deal with Blackheart Records), and his mom Joyce managed KISS and Donna Summer. His childhood living room played host to the likes of Carole Bayer-Sager, Diana Ross, Neil Diamond, and Burt Bacharach. From there Bogart quickly moved through the worlds of A&R and songwriting, finding success in both. On the A&R side, he helped discover everyone from Eminem to Maroon 5 to Ricky Reed. On the songwriter side, he had hits with “S.O.S.” for Rihanna, “Halo” for Beyoncé, and many more. In 2025, he was elected Vice Chair of the Recording Academy, and also serves as the Chair for their Songwriters and Composers Wing.
None of the success with Seeker might have happened without a fortuitous meeting with UK investment group M&G. Around 2019, Bogart was looking for a way to centralize all the various parts of his career to date – A&R, publishing, songwriting, etc – into something larger and more meaningful, and with more opportunities to continue creative mentorship. At the time, he wasn’t sure what that would look like. "I wasn't necessarily inspired to start my own company, along the lines of what Seeker has become,” Bogart remembers. “Not until I met M&G." The company wanted to help invest in the next great independent music company, and a ten-hour meeting during GRAMMY week 2020 later, it all clicked.
With M&G on board, Bogart recruited some of the top minds in the business to join him leading the company. Today, the executive team includes Chief Financial Officer Todd Von Mende, former CFO of Capitol Music Group and Dreamworks Television; Chief Rights & Royalties Officer Jennifer
Blakeman, former CCO/President for one77 Music and Atlas Publishing; General Counsel Dan Stuart, former head of AWAL’s US business affairs team and Partner at King, Holmes, Paterno & Soriano; and Chief Creative Officer Steven Melrose, former Managing Director at Epic (Sony) UK and Head of A&R Capitol Records, in addition to being an active artist manager – a role that, Bogart knew from personal experience, requires you to be nimble and “dangerous at everything” in order to succeed.
The team works with a Board representing M&G and chaired by John Smith. Smith spent 25 years in the media industry, including 7 years as CEO, growing BBC Worldwide into an international powerhouse with brands like Dancing with the Stars and Top Gear. He had been advising M&G on ways to get involved in the music industry and ultimately on the set up of Seeker.
In everything the company does, Seeker follows a creative-first focus: “Invest with our hearts, then invest with our money.” The company only goes after catalogs and writers Bogart and his creative team are passionate about - songs he wishes he had written, or projects he wishes he had worked on. "As a creative myself, I've only found myself excelling when I got to work on things that inspired me,” Bogart says.
After so many years excelling in so many areas of the entertainment industry – songwriter, A&R, manager, agent, producer, publisher, executive producer, Recording Academy leader, songwriter advocate – Bogart has finally found a place where all the various threads of his career tie together at Seeker. “I really feel like songwriting was the first act of my career, and Seeker is the second,” he says. “We understand what songwriters’ needs are and how to support them, because there’s a songwriter running the company.”