Titch’s head of music, Cindy Charles, has died after being concerned in a visitors accident final week in The Netherlands. She was 69.
Twitch CEO Daniel Clancy confirmed Charles’ dying Friday on LinkedIn. Clancy remarked that “anybody that makes use of music on Twitch owes a debt of gratitude to Cindy’s work. She all the time had a vibrant smile on her face at the same time as she negotiated unprecedented music licensing agreements for Twitch together with the current DJ settlement.”
That deal, which particularly covers DJs who live-stream on the platform, was introduced in June and concerned Twitch signing music licensing offers with all three main labels — Common Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Leisure — in addition to many indie labels represented by Merlin.
Charles was meant to talk on a panel Thursday on the Amsterdam Dance Occasion, an annual dance music trade convention within the Dutch capital, providing experience for DJs utilizing Twitch.
Earlier than her six years at Twitch, Charles labored as an unbiased digital media advisor and in addition spent three years at Amazon, the place she labored as the pinnacle of enterprise growth within the music division of Amazon Ticketing, together with working within the Video Shorts division. Earlier in her profession, she spent seven years at Viacom, the place she managed digital authorized and enterprise affairs for entities inside MTV Networks.
Past these positions, Charles served as an advisor to the board of governors on the Recording Academy, was a co-founder of Girls in Digital, which has greater than 1,500 members, and co-founded the San Francisco chapter of She is the Music.
Charles was based mostly in Berkeley, California, and grew up in Queens, New York, majoring in political science at SUNY Buffalo. She is survived by her husband, Ricky Fishman, and her two sons.
“Each success, each setback, each second of working towards our shared mission felt deeply private,” Twitch’s Kira Karlstrom wrote in a remembrance of Charles, “as a result of Cindy made it that approach. She cared about her staff with all her coronary heart, and our work was an extension of that care.”
This story first appeared on Billboard.com.
