Thomas Coesfeld is Chief Executive Officer of BMG.
Coesfeld was appointed as CEO of BMG on July 1, 2023. He succeded Hartwig Masuch in the role.
Coesfeld was previously Chief Financial Officer of BMG from April 2021, and before that was Deputy Chief Financial Officer of BMG from October 2020.
Thomas Coesfeld: Professional history
Prior to joining BMG in 2020, Tomas Coesfeld was a member of the Executive Committee of the Bertelsmann Printing Group, and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at Mohn Media in Gütersloh.
After studying business administration in Vallendar, Washington, and Atlanta, Thomas Coesfeld began his career in 2014 as a management consultant at McKinsey in Munich, where he gained experience in sales and strategy with a focus on the insurance, logistics, and automotive industries.
He joined Bertelsmann at the beginning of 2016 and initially spent a year working for various subsidiaries of the Group – including the growth platforms BMG and Relias in the U.S. – as part of the Bertelsmann Entrepreneurs Program (BEP). He then moved to Mohn Media in early 2017.
In November 2018, Thomas Coesfeld was appointed CSO of Mohn Media, joining the company’s management team.
In June 2019, he was additionally appointed to the Bertelsmann Printing Group’s management board in the same capacity.
Thomas Coesfeld: Family history and Bertelsmann
According to the Financial Times, Coesfeld and his brother Carsten are the seventh generation of the Bertelsmann dynasty.
They are the grandsons of the late Reinhard Mohn, who transformed a provincial printing press that started out publishing Bibles into a global media publishing house.
Mohn’s son Christoph, a child of his second marriage, is the chair of Bertelsmann’s Supervisory Board.
The Coesfeld brothers are Reinhard Mohn’s grandchildren from his first relationship.
Thomas Coesfeld: professional philosophy
In an op/ed published by Music Business Worldwide in 2022, Thomas Coesfeld said: “Improving service levels, better aligning the interests of music companies with the artists and songwriters they serve is, I believe, the single most important transformational opportunity offered by streaming.
“The first phase of that transformation focused on fairness and transparency, a recognition that the historic relationship of music companies to musicians was unbalanced and often unfair and that simply translating the contractual terms of the analogue era to streaming was inappropriate and unsustainable.
“Much of the industry has now accepted in word if not always in deed that fairness and transparency are non-negotiable in the streaming age.
“The second phase, which we are currently in the middle of, is the growing understanding that music companies are now essentially service businesses to musicians. They are no longer the principals in the market. They work for the artists and songwriters who actually make the music.
“Progress here is slower. Understandably the larger the company, the less keen they are to accept that their historic role as the drivers of the business is over. But that is the unavoidable logic of the technology.”Music Business Worldwide