Patrons, Curators, Inventors & Thieves

10 years after the advent of internet file-sharing, record companies are still reeling. Their industry has lost almost half of its global market value following the revolutionary disruption to a value-chain. On the eve of its own 'iPod moment', the publishing industry watches and waits, as uncertain as the music industry was years earlier.

Dr Jonathan Wheeldon is currently an Executive Director and the Chief Financial Officer of Macmillan Publishers Limited, a global corporation with leading brands in science, education, trade and academic publishing. A relative newcomer to publishing, the majority of his career has been in the entertainment business, in positions based in New York, Madrid, Los Angeles and London. He spent 10 years at the world's largest music company, originally PolyGram, which became even bigger when purchased by Seagram who merged it with Universal Music and sold the combined business to Vivendi in 1999. Around that time he was involved in launching an ambitious internet portal for music aimed at serving Vivendi's strategic interests in mobile telephony through its joint venture with Vodafone. Following a successful period as Finance Director for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group, he was most recently Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at EMI Group. In late 2006, he was amongst the last group of executives to present strategic options to the board of EMI as a public company, which led to its sale to private equity firm Terra Firma in 2007. The deal was acknowledged as very good for EMI shareholders, though widely reported and commented on in the media as over-leveraged and poorly-timed by the acquirer. He is a Chartered Accountant, and has a BA in English Literature from Durham University. He was recently awarded a Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) degree from Henley Business School for his research into the strategies of the music industry.