ICE announces new joint CEO Thorsten Sauer

Robert Ashcroft, CEO of PRS for Music, to continue to support ICE as a board member

ICE today announced plans to merge the ICE companies and the appointment of a new joint CEO: Thorsten Sauer.

Previously the President of Broadcast and Media Services at Ericsson, Thorsten helped build one of the largest media services companies in the industry, serving clients such as the BBC, ITV, Disney and Viacom.

The two companies, ICE Services, which licenses the rights mandated to it by both collecting societies and publishers, and ICE Operations, which manages both online operations and copyright, will be merged into a single entity, which will be known simply as ICE.

Robert Ashcroft, CEO of PRS for Music, was Interim CEO of ICE for the UK and will continue to support ICE as a board member, while Markus Nees, who held the position of CEO of ICE for Sweden and Germany, will continue in the leadership team as COO.

I am delighted to be joining ICE and look forward to working with an experienced team and organisation that is so highly regarded in the industry. I believe that by combining the strength of the different ICE companies, we are in a great position to deliver best-in-class services to the industry in these exciting times.

Since its inception, the vision of ICE has been to serve our customers in the multi-territory music licensing market through a flexible suite of services designed to speed up online licensing, online processing and operating the largest aggregation of repertoire from the world’s most advanced copyright database.

About ICE 

ICE offers a flexible suite of services for Publishers, Collection Management Organisations (CMOs) and Rightsholders. Services include; copyright administration, multi-territorial online licensing processing and licensing solutions for Digital Service Providers. ICE was created by PRS, STIM and GEMA and represents over 290,000 rightsholders alone through this partnership. The ICE copyright database holds over 32 million musical works. 

ICE is based in the UK, Germany and Sweden.