Peermusic CEO Jamie Cerreta Discusses Indie Publishing Amid Evolving Industry Landscape

When he was in his early 20s, touring bassist Jamie ­Cerreta was doing what he calls “the worst thing you can do” as a musician: looking for a job in the music industry. “I was trying to do both,” he jokes now, 30 years later. “When you’re an artist, everybody says you’ve got to give it 100%, but I thought I might like to get into the music business, too.”

Cerreta sought an interview with an executive at peermusic, which he says was largely informational and didn’t lead to a job. “But obviously, I had big hopes of where it would lead,” he says. It inspired the young Cerreta to make a career pivot from being the one onstage to the one scouting talent from the crowd. He eventually landed a gig at Mercury Records in 1997; in 2002, he joined Chrysalis’ publishing division, where he found he had a penchant for building up rosters from scratch — something he’d go on to do many times in the coming years.

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“There was basically no roster, and we were charged with building up one in the U.S. as a competitive alternative place for songs,” Cerreta explains about his time at the U.K.-based Chrysalis. “We became known as the development place.” His first signing was Ray LaMontagne , and from there he signed a stable of tastemaking indie talents like My Morning Jacket , Manchester Orchestra , St. Vincent and Bon Iver .

But as the 2010s set in, the independent publishing market shifted — Chrysalis was sold to BMG, along with a slew of other independents such as Bug, Windswept and Cherry Lane — and Cerreta went on to co-found his own outfit, Big Deal Music, in 2012, focusing more on chart hits. “A lot of those companies sold because they weren’t sure where the industry was going,” Cerreta says. “We could also see the tea leaves as Spotify was emerging: A lot of middle-class artists who would sell half a million records — and that was a really good business to be in in 2010 or 2007, with good publishing earnings — unfortunately found it a lot harder to earn money with the advent of Spotify.”

The plan for Big Deal worked: With hitmakers like John Ryan, Julian Bunetta, Dan Wilson and Teddy Geiger , Big Deal talent regularly wrote songs that landed on the Billboard Hot 100, including hits by Shawn Mendes , One Direction and Taylor Swift , and the company became a dominant force in independent publishing. Eventually, in 2020, Cerreta and his co-founders sold the company to Merck Mercuriadis ’ Hipgnosis.

Now, Cerreta is enjoying a bit of a homecoming. In August 2025, he was named president of the U.S. and Canada for the nearly 100-year-old family-owned publisher peermusic, the same company that sparked his interest in the music business in the first place. His mandate is a familiar one: Build up the frontline roster.

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He’s already begun to deliver, signing deals with Jim James and his band, My Morning Jacket, which Cerreta has worked with for the last 20 years; Blake Mills; This Is Lorelei; Water From Your Eyes; No I.D. ; Rob Moose; Pavement ; and MJ Lenderman. He also launched a venture with POEMS, the publisher behind hits by Benson Boone , Selena Gomez , Doja Cat and more.

“Coming back as the president of the company 30 years later is wild,” Cerreta says, shaking his head in disbelief. “But it really feels full circle.”

What attracted you to peermusic?

I’ve worked at companies that were partially worldwide, mostly U.S.- and European-based. But to have a global system of 39 offices in 33 countries is incredible. The offering is huge. To be competitive with anyone, and to know from being a client that the service is going to be delivered, is also huge. We can offer any type of deal. We can do outsourced deals around the world. It puts us in a position to be competitive on anything.

Peermusic has a long, storied history that you can build on, but it also means you’re not coming into a clean slate. How did you navigate taking the job and making it your own while keeping tradition alive? The tradition is amazing. Being a company that’s been involved in working with songwriters for 100 years across three generations of family members, and the fact that it’s a family-owned business that has taken care of songwriters [is invaluable] — having a long-term view on the value of copyrights and understanding what it means to work with an artist or a song for a long period of time [is important] — in our business these days there are somewhat short-term goals around the business. Publishing is not a short-term goal.

Deal structures in publishing have changed a lot, and what songwriters are looking for when they sign with a publisher seems to have changed. What do songwriters want in 2026?

The biggest thing a songwriter wants is service. They want a relationship. They want to know that they have the attention not just of the creative team but of the full company, and that they have access to them.

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The deal structures are ever-­evolving. In some ways, they’re going to shorter terms and shorter retention, and then rolling over on themselves. I’m seeing life-of-copyright deals again for the first time in a long time around certain opportunities for writers that maybe give them access they didn’t have.

What do you mean by “access”?

In a lot of these situations, it’s being around writers who are having big hits. That kind of access.

What do you think about the state of the independent publishing business in 2026?

I think it’s really healthy. People are looking for lots of different options, and it’s fantastic that there are a lot of options for songwriters. There are every shape and size, and I ­encourage everyone I meet to meet as many ­different styles as they can. At the end of the day, I want songwriters to be as committed to coming here as we are committed to bringing them here.

One of the real lessons I’ve learned in my career is that you can’t sign everything. You have to cultivate the grass you’re standing on, worry about what you can worry about and give your full attention to the writers who want to be here. We’re not right for everyone. There are different places, all different sizes and shapes, and songwriters have different needs. I can only do what we do.

What are you hearing from songwriters about the hardest things facing them today?

There are certainly rate issues and questions about how they should manage AI. Those are business-level concerns. But in general, I feel there’s real excitement because there’s a new spirit in songwriting that a hit can come from anywhere now. The idea that labels had a series of artists they were going to promote and make into stars — I think songwriters look at that as no longer being the case. You can be a young songwriter who’s just starting out and have a hit.

You also see it from the biggest songwriters in the world. There was a time when there was a group of songwriters writing for the biggest artists in the world and having hits. That was a closed-off zone that you had to earn your way into, build, get there and find access to, and people were protective of it. But I think the biggest songwriters in the world recognize that an artist who doesn’t necessarily have everything going on could have a hit. So I think there’s a lot of songwriters going toward their passions and artists who move them, as opposed to thinking about artists who will immediately have success or are poised to have success because they have the backing of something.

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The idea that a hit can come from anywhere is a refreshing way to look at it. Some will see it more negatively, as it’s impossible to know what comes next. How much data goes into your decision-making as an A&R executive?

We’re always looking at the data. It shouldn’t be ignored, but it can’t be the predominant part of our decision-making. That goes back to community and relationship-­building. I want everyone who works here to have that passion about signing an artist — not to say, “We should do this because the numbers are right.” We’re not a company that’s going to take a ton of shots. It’s not good for a company like us to be flippant about someone’s career because we weren’t invested with passion from the start and were just reading research and numbers.

Why do you think peermusic was ready to dive even further into frontline, in an age when buying and selling catalogs has become such a hot market and likely a much more dependable business?

First and foremost, we’re across all of that. We’re also doing acquisitions. Peer has an incredible catalog that stretches across 100 years, so the base of what we have in terms of special catalog is already here. But I think it’s about seeing an open lane to build a creative staff, build new catalog and support songwriters. There are all different shapes and sizes of [publishing] companies, but our primary focus right now is roster-building, bringing in artists and creating a community. I think there’s a lot of opportunity within the consolidation of companies to be a great global independent. That offering is special, and I’ve been lucky to see that a lot of managers, artists and lawyers are very interested in it.

Are you typically doing co-­publishing deals, administration deals or a mix?

For new artists, we’re primarily doing co-publishing, but we do all of them. We’re doing the Gram Parsons deal, which is an administration deal. I just signed Tedeschi Trucks , and there are a lot of combinations in that. It’s catalog, and there’s an administration portion and a co-publishing portion to some of the deals. We just signed Pavement, which is an administration deal with the potential of a go-forward deal. On the frontline, we prefer co-publishing, but that’s why I wanted to join Peer. We have the ­opportunity to do any kind of deal, whatever works, because we’ve ­decided to work together.

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/pro/peermusic-ceo-indie-publishing-2026-what-songwriters-want/)._