Tom Sturges spent more than 25 years as a senior executive in the music industry, serving as President of Chrysalis Music, EVP and Head of Creative for Universal Music publishing, and VP/GM of Shaquille O’Neal’s imprint TWIsM Records.
Tom signed some of the biggest names in the business, including Smashing Pumpkins, 50 Cent & G Unit, Foo Fighters, Outkast & Goodie Mob, Jack Johnson, 3 Doors Down, Slaughter, Green Jelly and Chris Brown, as well as Baby Bash, Katrina & The Waves, Vanessa Carlton, Owl City, and Afroman. Additionally, Tom signed several hit writer/producers including Mark Batson, Troy Taylor, Sean Garrett and Jason Epperson (aka Jay-E) among many others. Selling a combined 175M albums, 26M singles and 18M downloads, the writers and artists signed by Tom have wrote 14 #1 singles and have received 12 Grammy awards.
Currently a speaker and teacher, Tom co-created and teaches “The Music Business Now” at UCLA with fellow professors Jeff Jampol, Steve Berman and Lenny Beer. The class, part of the Music Business minor, is going on its 10th year at the university. Tom has been invited to speak at several schools including UCLA, USC, Princeton, and NYU and has given a presentation at the Aspen Ideas Festival and the Aspen Challenge.
As a popular published Author, Tom released two books on parenting, Parking Lot Rules (Ballantine Books, May 2008) and Grow the Tree You Got ( Penguin/Tarcher, May 2011). His latest work, Every Idea is a Good Idea: Be Creative Anytime, Anywhere is available for presale and comes out in late Sept. 2014. In Every Idea Is a Good Idea Sturges draws from his decades of experience to fashion a playbook of dependable, repeatable methods to help identify and harness the creative power within you. The compiled methods are applicable to any area of interest from music and art to architecture and business. Readers can tap into the minds of Carole King, Diane Warren, Gerry Goffin, Babyface, Dr. Dre, Sir Paul McCartney, Alan and Marilyn Bergman and many more to help inspire and connect with their own creative potential.
