Christiaan Kröner

PRESIDENT, FUGA

Christiaan Kröner is the President of Downtown-owned FUGA, the world’s leading B2B music distribution, marketing and technology business.

Kröner was a founding member of SellaBand, one of the first crowdfunding platforms for music, before joining FUGA’s Amsterdam headquarters in 2012. There, he led the distributor’s growing services department. Conscious of the innovation required in a then-declining market, Christiaan used his strong digital music business management skills to build FUGA’s aggregation and marketing department from scratch.

After his promotion to COO in 2020, Christiaan played a key part in FUGA’s growth internationally and has overseen a 30% increase in staff since the beginning of 2021. The FUGA team has now grown to over 200, with hubs in more than a dozen territories across LATAM, GSA, and the Nordics. In 2023, FUGA counted almost 1400 music companies as clients.

Kröner has also been instrumental in building and developing both FUGA’s marketing services and its licensing and royalty accounting departments. FUGA’s marketing services team, reporting to Kröner, was nominated for its fourth subsequent Label Services award at the Music Week Awards 2024. In the last few years, Christiaan Kröner has overseen one of the industry’s most exciting and pioneering joint ventures – FUGA and Japanese music and media company Space Shower Networks’ new enterprise, SPACE SHOWER FUGA. Announced at the end of 2020 and open for business as of September 2021, SPACE SHOWER FUGA has helped open up the Japanese region for independent music companies, adding 15 new DSPs to FUGA’s industry-leading cohort of platforms, whilst building out expertise on the ground.

Alongside this, Kröner has led efforts to more closely integrate FUGA’s proprietary technology with Downtown Music Holding’s other businesses, notably Downtown Neighbouring Rights, which merged with FUGA’s own Neighbouring Rights service in 2021. Kröner also led the integration of Adrev into FUGA – which created the independent industry’s most powerful UGC monetization platform – and oversaw the integration of award-nominated Downtown company, found.ee, into FUGA’s platform, providing clients with a streamlined marketing tool.

Under Kröner’s leadership, FUGA is a founding member of the Music Fights Fraud alliance, and actively invests and collaborates with partners to address and eradicate streaming abuse.

Kröner has been twice recognized in the Billboard International Power Player list 2022 + 2023 and Indie Power Players list in 2023.