He is credited with helping launch the careers of Billy Joel, The Monkees, Tracy Chapman and more
Charles Koppelman, a legendary music executive whose career whose spanned four decades before becoming a top executive at Martha Stewart and Steve Madden’s companies, died on Friday at age 82.
The news was confirmed by his son, Brian, the showrunner of Showtime’s “Billions,” and daughter Jenny Koppelman Hutt in a social media post. While no official cause of death was given, Brian wrote, “He spent his last days surrounded by those he loved the most.”
Koppelman was one of the most dominant industry executives of the last half-century. Koppelman worked with musicians ranging from Barbra Streisand and the Lovin’ Spoonful to Prince, Billy Joel and Vanilla Ice. He began his career as a singer but eventually became a publisher, working for Don Kirshner’s Aldon Music, with Clive Davis at CBS Records. He entered into a partnership with longtime Sony/ATV chief Martin Bandier and founded SBK Entertainment which he was sold to EMI in 1989 for $300 million.
After leaving his post at the helm of EMI in 1997, he worked with both Steve Madden and Martha Stewart before returning to the music business in 2011. Via his own C.A.K. Entertainment, he scored branding deals for the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony with Kohl’s, Nicki Minaj and Adam Levine with K-Mart.
