For sixteen years Veronica Syrtash has played an invaluable role with us at CMRRA and she recently moved into the role of Vice President, Legal and Business Affairs.
Veronica graduated from Queen’s University with a B.A. and continued on to earn her law degree from the University of Western Ontario. Veronica completed her articles of clerkship at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Her background as a musician then led to her realization that she “wanted to be part of the music industry,” but as she wasn’t sure in what context. After exploring the many facets of this business, she realized she was drawn to the world of music publishing.
Veronica started networking with industry professionals and soon launched her career at CMRRA. The year she started working at CMRRA was the year that Napster appeared on the scene and things just kept getting more interesting from that point onwards. Being in an industry of constant change meant that Veronica constantly found new challenges at CMRRA, but she also found time to work toward her Masters of Law in Intellectual Property through Osgoode Hall Law School.
More recently, Veronica has been involved more directly in the business side of music licensing leading the negotiations with the major record labels and online music services. She has worked tirelessly to secure licensing deals in Canada for services such as Apple, Google, and Spotify. CMRRA is constantly looking to work with new services to ensure that the rights of our music publisher clients are well represented and licensing is made easy. In the course of licensing online services over the past decade, CMRRA has identified the musical works and associated rightsholders for tens of millions of recordings sold and streamed online. We have also collected more than $100 million dollars in royalties for our music publisher clients.
Veronica is the proud Mom of a toddler and still tries to find time to play the cello and piano. She is drawn to a wide variety of music but truly believes that everyone should share her view that Stevie Wonder transcends all musical tastes! “Have you ever met someone who could honestly say he doesn’t like Stevie??”
