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{{short description|Canadian music and media executive}}
{{short description|Canadian music and media executive}}
{{Infobox person
{{Infobox person

Revision as of 21:32, 13 February 2024

Randy Lennox
NationalityCanadian
Occupation(s)Music and Media Executive, Producer
Board member ofBanff World Media Festival, Music Canada, Canada's Walk of Fame, Roy Thompson Hall, Massey Hall, Smilezone Foundation

Randy Lennox is a Canadian music and media executive.

He has served as president and CEO Universal Music Canada and president of Bell Media, Canada's largest Music label and media company respectively, working very closely from day one in developing internationally renowned Canadian artists like The Weeknd , Drake , Shawn Mendes , Justin Bieber , Nelly Furtado and Alicia Cara and creating original content for television and film.

Lennox has been described by U2's Bono as a "music maven turned telecommunications mogul," and "a man without whom American and Canadian music would certainly not be the same" by Gene Simmons of Kiss.[1]

Lennox is also involved with many organizations in the Canadian music scene: he is the talent chair and executive producer of Canada's Walk of Fame and served as chair of the Massey & Roy Thomson Hall's Board.[2] In January 2019, he was named the chair of the board for the Banff World Media Festival.[3]

Lennox has been featured four times on Toronto Life Magazine Top most influential list. In 2017 he was awarded the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award at the 2017 Juno Awards and was recently named Canadian media executive of the year by Playback magazine.

Lennox is co- founder in his latest venture LOFT ( Entertainment Inc. ) which is a Music Management and Film / Television Content Company which opened in September 2023.

LOFT has offices in London , Nashville , Los Angeles and Toronto.

Career

Universal Music Canada

While at Universal, Lennox created the #1 best selling album series in Canadian history with Big Shiny Tunes,[4][5]

Lennox applied lessons from Big Shiny Tunes to Oh What a Feeling: A Vital Collection of Canadian Music, a Canadian-focused compilation that he assembled to celebrate the Juno Award's 25th Anniversary. The 4-disc box-set was the first-ever Canadian box-set to be certified diamond for sales of over one million copies.[6] Lennox also partnered with CARAS for the album and together raised more than $8.2 million to fund Warchild , Music Counts and other Canadian charities.[7]

In 1998, Universal Music Canada merged with Polygram Canada and at age 36 Lennox appointed as company's president,[8][9][1] and then in 2001, president and CEO.[10][11]

Under Lennox, Universal Music Canada developed many Canadian artists like Justin Bieber, Drake, Sam Roberts, Alessia Cara, The Tenors, The Weeknd, Shawn Mendes, Nelly Furtado and The Tragically Hip, among others, while working closely with long-time Canadian music icons like Shania Twain, Diana Krall and Bryan Adams.[12] Lennox also conceived and produced the Juno Award winning song Wavin' Flag (as performed by the Canadian supergroup Young Artists for Haiti) which raised more than $3 million dollars in disaster relief funds following the 2010 Earthquake in Haiti and the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games Anthem.[13][14]

While Lennox was CEO Universal Music Canada was named Music Company of the Year for 16 consecutive years at Canadian Music Week.[15]

Bell Media

In 2015, Lennox joined Bell Media as President, Broadcasting with a five-year mandate to "bring Content based thinking" to Bell Media's original production’s. In this role Lennox brought Bell Media into new markets with Bat Out Of Hell: The Musical and talent competition The Launch, which was picked up and expanded internationally by Sony Pictures Television.

Lennox described world-class original content as the core of his strategy, and focused Bell Media's efforts and investments in production and partnerships to secure exclusive rights to the premium international content while exporting such content to other markets.[16][17]

In 2017, Lennox was appointed overall president of Bell Media[18] taking responsibility for "strategy and operations for conventional, pay and specialty television, radio, digital media, out-of-home advertising and special projects."[19]

New Formats & Content

During Lennox's tenure Bell Media dramatically expanded the number of content formats produced, from musical theatre to musical reality tv competition and a number of documentaries. Working with Meat Loaf collaborator Jim Steinman, Lennox co-produced 2017's Bat Out Of Hell: The Musical, a stage adaptation of the 1977 album that received wide acclaim over its runs in London, Toronto and New York.[20] Meanwhile, working with Big Machine Records' Scott Borchetta, Lennox co-created and produced along with Insight Productions the original reality music competition franchise, The Launch, a new format that was picked up by Sony Pictures Television for international distribution.[21][22]

Bell Media also began producing feature documentaries,produced by Lennox, including the music focused Long Time Running, which featured Tragically Hip, Home Town, a solo acoustic concert story featuring Neil Young,[23] the 2019 documentary David Foster: Off the Record.[citation needed] Lennox also co-produced Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band. The documentary, co-produced with Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer opened the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, the first-ever opening of the festival by a Canadian documentary.[24]

Lennox also co-produced the 2019 Clive Owen film The Song Of Names with Robert Lantos[25] and Lennox green lit “ Letter Kenny “ and “ Canada’s Drag Race “ as well as dramas including Cardinal, Transplant and Frontier. Working with singer-songwriter Jann Arden, in 2018 Lennox also executive produced Jann, an original TV series featuring Arden playing a fictionalized version of herself. Premiering in early 2019, the first season would become "most-watched" Canadian television series and comedy of the year.[26][27] In October 2020, Hulu acquired American distribution rights to the series.[28]

Partnerships

In line with both his original and expanded mandates, Lennox made a number of deals designed to increase Bell Media's library of exclusive content. Starting with internet radio's iHeartMedia and the Just For Laughs comedy festival,[29] Lennox bolstered Bell Media's library with international partners that would grow to include Lionsgate and Pinewood Studios and premium U.S. television brands Starz,[30] Vice Media[31] and BNN Bloomberg,[32] and HBO[33] and HBO Max.[34]

This increased focus on original content also saw licensing deals with streaming competitor Netflix[35] and production for American filmmaking magnate Jeffrey Katzenberg.[36]

In 2019, citing a scarcity of studio space in Toronto's $2 billion film and television industry,[37] Lennox led Bell Media's majority acquisition and subsequent expansion of Toronto's Pinewood Studios. To alleviate its more than two-year backlog,[38] Lennox led a 200,000-square foot production space expansion for Pinewood, for which began construction in November 2020.[39]

In April 2020, Lennox and Bell Media / Insight led a coalition of over 100 media partners in broadcasting Stronger Together, Tous Ensemble, the largest multi-platform broadcast event in Canadian history.[40]

Crave (formerly CraveTV)

Lennox has described the Canadian streaming landscape as “ under developed,” and that Bell Media could help,[41] and in 2018 rebranded and relaunched the CraveTV service as Crave, a standalone subscription service and the first time Bell had ever unbundled premium content from its wireline products.

In interviews Lennox has described a responsibility to meet customer expectations,[42] and his plan to attract new subscribers with exclusive world-class original content by producing it in house and patterning internationally.[43] By the end of 2020, Crave had amassed nearly 3 million subscribers and was HBO Max's first international launch partner,[34] in addition to earlier partnerships Lennox signed HBO,[33] Starz, Showtime, Vice, TIFF and others.[38]

Stronger Together, Tous Ensemble

On April 22, 2020 Bell Media announced Stronger Together, Tous Ensemble, a fundraising concert in support of Food Banks Canada on April 26 became the largest broadcasting event in Canadian history.[44][40] The event saw all of the competing Canadian media companies working together and led by Bell Media to produce and deliver the disaster response special.[40]

Conceived of and Co-produced by Lennox and Insight Productions, the television special featured over 80 prominent Canadian musicians, artists, activists, actors and athletes including Celine Dion, Chris Hadfield, Michael Bublé, and Drake raising $8.6 million in donations to Food Banks Canada by text.[45] In an interview with FYI Music News, Lennox shared that the entire concert, from conception to broadcast, was assembled in just 12 days, with participants filming their own segments at home and final mastering and mixing being done the day before broadcast.[46]

The event, broadcast simultaneously on over 100 platforms, including television, radio, streaming and on demand, is the largest television event in Canadian history.[40] In all, the 90-minute commercial-free event raised $8.6 million Food Banks Canada.[47][48]

Documentaries and Productions

Lennox continues to produce documentaries, films, TV shows and music, drawing from his longstanding relationships in the entertainment industry.

In a pair of 2021 interviews with Playback Magazine[49] and FYI Music News,[50] Lennox remarked that his love for documentary and TV productions had grown to match his love for music. He also detailed a slate of new productions:

Black and White, a documentary about Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, made with the team behind the Lennox-produced David Foster documentary Won Four ( 4 ) Canadian Screen Awards

Lennox won A 2023 Emmy Award for Best documentary about Canadian-American singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte Marie, titled Carry It On made in partnership with the same creative team Lennox worked with on the Robbie Robertson documentary, Once Were Brothers.[51]

He Exec produced “ This is Pop “ for Netflix as well as Rock & Roll Machine , with Banger which is a documentary about rock band Triumph

A film called Adult Children, made in partnership Amanda Seyfried and Tom Sadoski.

Also Born to be Wild , a documentary about the iconic Canadian-American rock band Steppenwolf in partnership with Rezolution Pictures, and a Loft Entertainment Production of the Russell Peters Documentary is currently in production.

To date as producer Lennox has won 8 Canadian Screen Awards , 2 Juno Awards and an Emmy Award.

Additional charitable involvement

The Oh What A Feeling series, produced by Lennox, has raised more than $8.2 million for Canadian charities across several volumes.[7][52][53]

Along with industry veterans Bob Ezrin and Gary Slaight, Lennox organized Young Artists for Haiti, a supergroup including Drake, Justin Bieber, Nelly Furtado and Avril Lavigne that recorded a cover of K'naan's "Wavin' Flag" as a charity single in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake raising more than two million dollars for disaster relief.[54][55][56]

In 2023 Bob Ezrin and Lennox were asked & recreated a new Anthem for mental health based their earlier work Wavin’ Flag.

Lennox and his Loft Entertainment team worked in partnership with Peacock Alley to create & produce “ What I wouldn’t do ( North Star Calling )featuring 50 young Canadian artists on the song / video that has already had over 2 million YouTube views and has helped raise mental health awareness as part of the Feel out loud campaign currently at $ 116 million raised with kids help phone. The Multi Million $ média Campaign will continue in 2023/ 2024.

Lennox is also a director of the Smilezone Foundation, an organization that donates play zones to hospitals and paediatric care facilities, and sits on the board of CARAS MusiCounts.[57][58]

Awards and recognition

References

  1. ^ a b 2017 JUNO Awards' Gala Tribute to Randy Lennox, 2017-04-17, retrieved 2018-01-18
  2. ^ "Bell Media's Randy Lennox to Receive 2017 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award at Juno Awards". Billboard. Retrieved 2017-06-21.
  3. ^ "Banff World Media Festival Names New Board Chair (Exclusive)". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2019-01-18.
  4. ^ "Randy Lennox". IMDb. Retrieved 2015-06-08.
  5. ^ "How Big Shiny Tunes Defined CanRock". www.vice.com. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  6. ^ "Randy Lennox To Be Honored At Canadian Music Week". Billboard. Retrieved 2019-08-15.
  7. ^ a b "Randy Lennox". IMDb. Retrieved 2019-12-15.
  8. ^ LeBlanc, Larry (29 Mar 1997). "Billboard Magazine 29 Mar 1997".
  9. ^ Strauss, Neil (December 21, 1998). "A Major Merger Shakes Up the World of Rock". The New York Times.
  10. ^ Dickie, Mary (February 1, 2008). "Reinventing the music biz: Universal Music Canada's Randy Lennox". Strategy. Retrieved November 22, 2014.
  11. ^ LeBlanc, Larry (29 Dec 2001). "Billboard 29 Dec 2001".
  12. ^ "Toronto's 50 Most Influential People: Randy Lennox | Toronto Life". Toronto Life. 2015-11-19. Retrieved 2017-07-06.
  13. ^ "Randy Lennox". Discogs. Retrieved 2015-06-08.
  14. ^ "Bell Media taps music industry veteran to lead production, broadcasting". marketingmag.ca. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  15. ^ "Past Winners | Canadian Music and Broadcast Industry Awards". cmw.net. Retrieved 2015-06-08.
  16. ^ Bailey, Katie (13 June 2016). "Randy Lennox makes his mark at Bell Media". Retrieved 2017-03-15.
  17. ^ "Randy Lennox, Bell's 'Content Guru'". FYIMusicNews. Retrieved 2017-02-02.
  18. ^ "Bell Media juggling executives as president leaves for job at NFL". The Globe and Mail. Archived from the original on 27 February 2017. Retrieved 28 February 2017.
  19. ^ "BCE names Randy Lennox new President of Bell Media". BNN Bloomberg. Reuters. 2017-02-28. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  20. ^ "Bat Out of Hell - The Musical". www.show-score.com. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  21. ^ "Scott Borchetta's Big Machine, Canada's Bell Media Ring Up Deal on New TV Talent Property". Billboard. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  22. ^ Clarke, Stewart (2018-02-22). "Sony Prepares 'The Launch' for International Take Off". Variety. Retrieved 2018-04-02.
  23. ^ "Neil Young show to stream worldwide from Canada". ctv.ca. Archived from the original on February 2, 2018. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  24. ^ White, Peter (2019-07-18). "Rock Doc 'Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band' To Open Toronto Film Festival". Deadline. Retrieved 2019-07-21.
  25. ^ Hatzitolios, Chloe. "Clive Owen WWII film 'The Song of Names' getting TIFF Gala Presentation". etalk. Retrieved 2019-12-14.
  26. ^ "CTV's JANN is the #1 New Canadian Series of the Year". Bell Media. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  27. ^ "Ratings No Laughing Matter For Jann Arden's New TV Series". FYIMusicNews. 2019-03-27. Retrieved 2019-04-24.
  28. ^ "Hulu secures U.S. rights Jann Arden's semi-autobiographical sitcom". thestar.com. 2020-10-21. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  29. ^ "Bell Media among group acquiring Just For Laughs production company". Global News. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  30. ^ Littleton, Cynthia (2018-01-23). "Starz Expands Into Canada With Bell Media Pact". Variety. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  31. ^ "Bell Media signs licensing deal with Vice, hoping to draw new subscribers". Retrieved 2019-12-15.
  32. ^ "Bloomberg, Bell Media strike deal to rebrand BNN". Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  33. ^ a b Wilner, Norman (2018-11-01). "Canadians can finally stream new HBO shows without a cable subscription". NOW Magazine. Retrieved 2019-12-15.
  34. ^ a b "Bell Media signs deal with HBO Max to strengthen Crave's streaming library". Retrieved 2019-11-03.
  35. ^ Bailey, Katie (November 16, 2015). "Discovery's Frontier pushes int'l boundaries with Netflix". Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  36. ^ "Quibi Acquires Daily News, Sport Shows for Canadian Service". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2020-03-05.
  37. ^ "Klingons in Toronto? Get set for the Pinewood Studios tour | The Star". thestar.com. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  38. ^ a b "A Canadian competitor's view from the fast-moving streaming war | The Star". thestar.com. Retrieved 2019-12-14.
  39. ^ "Pinewood Toronto Studios Begins Construction on Multi-Stage Expansion". www.newswire.ca. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  40. ^ a b c d "Where to watch the historic 'Stronger Together' special Sunday night". CTVNews. 2020-04-24. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
  41. ^ "Bell bringing HBO Max streaming service content to Canada after signing long-term deal". Financial Post. 2019-10-31. Retrieved 2019-11-04.
  42. ^ "Bell doubles down on Crave with soft rebrand, premium service that includes current HBO content". Financial Post. 2018-11-05. Retrieved 2018-11-20.
  43. ^ McLeod, James. "Bell bringing HBO Max streaming service content to Canada after signing long-term deal | The Guardian". www.theguardian.pe.ca. Retrieved 2019-11-04.
  44. ^ "Food Banks Canada". FOODBANKS. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
  45. ^ "Star-studded Stronger Together to be biggest multiplatform broadcast in Canadian history". Retrieved 2020-04-26.
  46. ^ "Showtime: On The Fly With Bell Media President Randy Lennox". FYIMusicNews. 2020-04-24. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
  47. ^ "Stronger Together TV show raises $8.6 million for Food Banks Canada". torontosun. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  48. ^ "Randy Lennox: The Exit Interview". FYIMusicNews. 2021-01-03. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  49. ^ Pinto, Jordan (June 28, 2021). "Randy Lennox lines up next gig; launches new production shingle". Retrieved 2021-09-27.
  50. ^ "Randy Lennox Aspires To 'Elevate'". FYIMusicNews. 2021-06-27. Retrieved 2021-09-27.
  51. ^ "Buffy Sainte-Marie to reflect on music and activism in upcoming documentary". wellandtribune.com. 2021-09-24. Retrieved 2021-09-27.
  52. ^ "Randy Lennox to be inducted to the Canadian Music and Broadcast Industry Hallof Fame". www.newswire.ca. Retrieved 2019-12-15.
  53. ^ Billboard. 1996-12-28.
  54. ^ Kielburger, Marc & Craig (January 5, 2015). "Finding hope in Haiti". Vancouver Sun.
  55. ^ "Canadian artists wave flag for Haitian relief". The London Free Press. Retrieved 2017-07-06.
  56. ^ "Canadian artists join in Wavin' Flag for Haiti". CBC News. Retrieved 2017-07-06.
  57. ^ "Scarborough and Rouge Hospital unveils 'Smilezones'". InsideToronto.com. 2017-02-09. Retrieved 2017-07-06.
  58. ^ "MusiCounts Celebrates 20th Anniversary". MusiCounts. 2017-02-13. Retrieved 2017-07-06.
  59. ^ "Maclean's, 2/18/2002, Vol. 115 Issue 7, p40, 2p".
  60. ^ Thompson, Robert (January 19, 2010). "Randy Lennox To Be Honored At Canadian Music Week". Retrieved November 22, 2014.
  61. ^ "Randy Lennox to be inducted to the Canadian Music and Broadcast Industry Hall of Fame" (Press release). Canadian Music Week. January 18, 2010. Retrieved November 22, 2014.
  62. ^ "2011 JUNO Award Winners - The JUNO Awards". Retrieved 2015-06-11.
  63. ^ "Worldwide Radio Summit Awards Results". Retrieved 2015-06-11.
  64. ^ "Toronto's 50 Most Influential People: Randy Lennox | Toronto Life". Toronto Life. Retrieved 2015-12-02.
  65. ^ "Bell Media's Randy Lennox to Receive 2017 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award at Juno Awards". Billboard. Retrieved 2017-02-02.
  66. ^ "Hitting a high note at Bell Media". Retrieved 2017-12-05.
  67. ^ "The 50 most influential Torontonians of 2018". Toronto Life. 2018-11-15. Retrieved 2018-11-20.
  68. ^ "The 50 Most Influential Torontonians of 2019". Toronto Life. 2019-11-21. Retrieved 2019-11-21.
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