Hunter Williams

Hunter Williams exited the womb to a click track and a tune…at least that’s how he sees it since his earliest childhood memories involve him banging on Tupperware bowls to the radio in a diaper.  He began playing the full drum kit in earnest at the age of 8 and began writing songs after picking up the guitar at 14.  There was no turning back - except that a musical father, turned businessman, persuaded him to have a fallback plan in the event his muse-gripped heart left him wanting.  

At this advice, he studied mass communications, music industry management, and business administration at Middle Tennessee State University, which helped him secure a position at SESAC as a writer/publisher account administrator in 1993.  Putting his love for playing and making music on pause, he applied his passion and creativity to the business of music and settled into helping other musical creatives foster successful careers.  He spent the next 20 years as a central figure in SESAC’s management team culminating in his position as Senior Vice President, Royalty Distribution and Research Services/Strategic Development.  

In 2013, Hunter left SESAC and soon became the Executive Director of the Production Music Association.  There he launched the first Production Music Conference (PMC) in 2014 and the first Mark Awards in 2015, as well as increasing membership, sponsorship, and collaboration with other industry trade groups including, the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), the Society of Composers and Lyricists (SCL), Association of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP), and the Guild of Music Supervisors (GMS). 

In 2015, he was asked to join SourceAudio, the leading B2B music hosting and delivery platform, as Executive Vice President of IP and Business Development to head up the company’s new music licensing, royalty administration, and monitoring initiatives.  There he launched SA Collect, a global publishing administration service aimed at helping SourceAudio clients more effectively monetize their performance and mechanical rights in over 75 countries.

In 2016 he founded Move Music with composer Timothy Edwards, where they built a catalog of close to 10,000 tracks for licensing to audio-visual productions.  After Move was acquired in 2022, Hunter and his son, Evan Williams, launched Liberated Trax as a conduit for introducing and promoting their network of local musicians’ recordings to the world of sync licensing.  Liberated Trax also served as the conduit for Hunter reconnecting with his old SESAC pal, Rob Aster, and the two collaborating to form Moxie Music Club in 2023.

Hunter’s latest venture is RoyaltyRetrieve, a publishing and neighboring rights administration service hyper-focused on facilitating and collecting royalty payments for music in media programming.