Manager, Global Initiatives & Local Support

Music is Universal. It’s the passionate and dedicated team at Universal Music who help make us the world’s leading music company. From A&R to finance, legal to digital, sales to marketing, Universal Music is the place to grow and develop your career within a truly commercial and innovative business that leads in everything it does.

Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles, and we are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, belief, age, marital status, background, pregnancy, or caring responsibilities. We also recognise the importance of diversity of thought within our teams and are fully committed to embracing the talents of people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other forms of neurocognitive variation. We will always seek to make appropriate adjustments to recruitment, workplaces, and work processes to be fully inclusive to people with different needs and working styles. If you need us to make any reasonable adjustments for you from application onwards, including alternatives to the online form or to disclose a neurocognitive condition, please email UniversalMusicCareers@umusic.com.

This position is for a Manager in the Global Initiatives and Local Support team. The individual will support royalty users worldwide and will be the first point of contact/knowledge for royalty systems and processes, as well as contributing to royalty projects and system improvements.

The B Side: Skills and Experience

• Work with the local Global Revenue and Royalties Optimization (GRRO) community worldwide (45+ territories), with a primary focus on local royalty processing optimisation and harmonisation through facilitating the adoption, use and support of current and future global royalty standard solutions and processes.
• Through interaction with the territories, contribute to/maintain a global knowledge-base, including a complete inventory of royalty related systems and processes; contact information, structure of royalty area, statement solution/volumes, issues faced, anomalies to standard global practice, territory specific requirements or restrictions, language, strengths, weaknesses, training required.
• First level of operational issue management and analysis support for any issues or questions raised by the users through to resolution where appropriate.
• Use your business skills to facilitate issue resolution by collaborating with both local and global teams to arrive at the right approach.
• The role will also require training new business users, and leading demos to various business units.
• Work closely with key users, product owners, business analysts and IT development teams to understand, document and communicate the needs of the global business users to development teams to ensure that the current and future systems supporting local royalties continue to support global business requirements.
• Use strong global relationships to facilitate the scoping, discovery, design and implantation of new business processes sometimes supported by the development of new applications.
• Provide inputs to change plans that mitigate risk and increase operational effectiveness of system and supporting processes rollouts.
• Understand the overall GRRO strategy to be able to contribute fully to the UMG GRRO team, ensuring the requirements and priorities of the local operating companies are fully represented.
• Work closely with Global teams from other threads (Finance, Repertoire etc) to ensure that the overall GRRO delivery needs are fully met from an end-to-end perspective.

Person Specification

Necessary

• The applicant will have proven royalty knowledge of both artist and copyright royalties from the Music Company perspective.
• Experience working in a royalty-related area, either as a royalty user or in project work relating to royalty systems required.
• Excellent stakeholder management experience and interpersonal skills to define and manage expectations, including local op-co staff at all levels, GRRO team members and IT.
• Self-motivated, able to work on own initiative and willing/able to travel representing the UMG GRRO Team as and when required.
• Applicants should be literate, numerate, analytical and have an aptitude to understand systems.
• Works and communicates effectively in a cross-geographic team environment – but is comfortable working independently as required.
• Ability to enhance existing business process and related systems.
• A calm problem solver working with changing requirements and priorities.
• Ability to mediate and resolve issues / reach consensus.
• Ability to work effectively under pressure to meet deadlines and resolved urgent incidents.
• Strong organisational skills.
• Intellectually curious, tenacious.
• Strong interpersonal and communications skills.
• Ability to communicate with user community, project management, developers, contractors, and all levels of management across the globe.
• Excellent interview, documenting and presentation skills.
• Strong analytical skills.
• Critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Process and procedures documentation experience.

Desirable

• An understanding of Artist Contracts, Rights and Music Business Revenue Streams.
• Experience of use of royalty accounting software packages.
• Experience of working and communicating in a global environment.
• Experience of use of accounting software (SAP).
• Experience with BI applications.
• Experience with MS Office products including Advanced/strong Excel skills.
• Experience delivering training to other people.

Just So You Know… The company presents this job description as a guide to the major areas and duties for which the jobholder is accountable. However, the business operates in an environment that demands change and the jobholder’s specific responsibilities and activities will vary and develop. Therefore, the job description should be seen as indicative and not as a permanent, definitive, and exhaustive statement.