After 54 Years On the NMPA Board, Ralph Peer II Becomes Chair

The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) has announced that Ralph Peer II, executive chair of peermusic, has been elected chair of its board of directors. Additionally, Golnar Khosrowshahi, founder/CEO of Reservoir, has been elected the board’s vice chair.

After 54 years serving on the NMPA board, Peer takes over the top post from Irwin Z. Robinson, who retired from the role in the last year. During his career, Peer has guided one of the most iconic and long running independent, family-owned publishers in the music business, serving both as its CEO and now as executive chair at different points in his tenure. Peermusic, first founded under the name Southern Music Publishing in 1928, now boasts 39 offices in 32 countries, and it looks after well over a million titles, either through ownership or administration. His daughter, Mary Megan Peer, now holds the CEO post, marking the third generation in the family to look after the company, which regularly ranks among the top ten publishers by marketshare on Billboard’s Publishers Quarterly.

For his decades of leadership, Peer was awarded the NMPA’s and the Music Publisher Association’s (MPA) Lifetime Achievement Award. He was the inaugural recipient of the ICMP Award for outstanding contribution to global music publishing, a recipient of the Music Publishers’ Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and has been honored as “Music Maker of the Year” at MIDEM.

Khosrowshahi, the newly elected vice chair, has also spent much of her publishing career on the NMPA board of directors. As founder/CEO of Reservoir, an independent music publisher, founded in 2007, Khosrowshahi’s company was early to see the value in the music catalog market. Now the home to top catalogs like De La Soul, Danny Brown and Louis Prima and frontline hitmakers like Offset and Steph Jones (“Espresso” and “Nonsense” by Sabrina Carpenter), Khosrowshahi became the first woman to lead a publicly traded independent music company in the U.S. when she took the company public in 2021.

Khosrowshahi also sits on the NMPA S.O.N.G.S. Foundation board of directors and served as board chair of Yo-Yo Ma’s musical collective, Silkroad. In 2022, she was elected to the board of directors for the New York Philharmonic.

Other current board members for the NMPA include the following publishing executives: Jon Platt, Jody Gerson, Jeff Pachman, Chip McLean, Jody Klein, Carianne Marshall, Laurent Hubert, Mike Molinar, Keith Hauprich, Tyler Bacon, Neil Gillis, Larry Mestel, Marti Cuevas, Jim Selby, Jon Singer and Ben Katovsky. Hitmakers Sean Douglas and Laura Veltz also serve on the board, providing representation for songwriters.