UTA expands London team with two new agents. LONDON (vip-booking) - United Talent Agency (UTA) has expanded its London music operation with the appointment of agents Becky Drouet and Anthony Brown, as part of a wider round of six executive hires and 11 internal promotions across its music division. Brown joins UTA after more than 13 years at CAA, where he worked on global touring strategies for international artists, with a particular focus on hip-hop and R&B. Drouet arrives after 18 years at LPO, where she booked major tours and live events for international artists. At UTA, she will work across touring as well as the agency's corporate and private events business. The appointments further strengthen UTA's UK and European music team following the promotion of James Wright to Co-Head of UK Music last month. Three of the agency's 11 newly promoted coordinators are also based in London: Dylan Bryant, Brooke Newton and Emily Rhodes. The wider coordinator group will support agents and executives across touring, marketing, brand partnerships, music crossover and A&R. "We're thrilled to welcome this exceptional group of agents and executives to UTA Music, and look forward to working together in support of our clients," said Sam Kirby Yoh and David Zedeck, Co-Heads of Global Music at UTA. The agency has also added Chris Anderson, Randy Freedman, Jordan Golenberg and Lauren Katzakian to its Los Angeles office.

Movers and shakers: UTA reveals six executive appointments. Plus: senior hires from The Team, Legends Global, and Live Nation Belgium make up the latest appointments round-up News By Ciaran Donnelly | 17 August 2026 Leading the latest round of industry appointments, United Talent Agency (UTA) has announced six new executive appointments, as well as 11 internal promotions across its music division. The company said the moves represent "the latest in a series of advancements" for the music department, following the recent elevation of James Wright to co-head of UK Music. Agents Anthony Brown and Becky Drouet join the firm's London office. Brown brings over thirteen years of industry experience from CAA, where he "shaped global touring careers and built long-term strategies for international artists, specialising in hip-hop and R&B", UTA said. Drouet will work across touring and the corporate/ private group, following a career spanning more than eighteen years at LPO, where she booked major tours and live events for international artists. Chris Anderson (agent), Randy Freedman (agent and music brand partnerships), Jordan Golenberg (agent), and Lauren Katzakian (executive, business affairs) have joined the Los Angeles office. "With over a decade of experience at Universal Music Group (UMG) and elsewhere, Katzakian is the newest member of the UTA Business Affairs team focusing on touring and Music Brand Partnerships," UTA said. The firm added: "Freedman also arrives via UMG, and will focus his efforts within the Music Brand Partnerships division, where he brings more than a decade of experience creating talent partnerships for some of the world's leading artists and brands. Golenberg joins from Day After Day Productions, and will bring several years of booking experience to his new role." Meanwhile, the company said Anderson "joins UTA following nearly two decades in artist management and talent representation, and is tasked with developing tour strategy for a diverse roster of artists at UTA". The agency haw also revealed its newest "coordinator class", which will support agents and executives across multiple divisions within the music department, including touring, marketing, brand partnerships, music crossover, A&R and more. The announcement includes promotions for Juan Aguirre, Lindsey Cole, Alia Lopotanak, and Mark Soleymani, who become the newest coordinators in the Los Angeles office, as well as for Julian Huff, Pearse Matteson, and Jenna Shatzman, who have been upped to coordinators in New York. Cat Ingersoll is the latest to be elevated to coordinator in Nashville, And Dylan Bryant, Brooke Newton, and Emily Rhodes are the latest coordinator promotions in London. In other agency news, The Team last week announced the hiring of David Valdez and Danielle Diab as director of tour marketing, both to be based in Los Angeles. The agency said the appointments "reflect The Team's continued expansion of its global tour marketing and ticketing capabilities". Valdez brings experience leading marketing campaigns for major tours, venues, and festivals, including in stints at Intuit Dome, Crypto.com Arena, and AEG Presents. Diab has also served in marketing roles at Live Nation and AEG Presents. At the same time, the company has promoted Sophie Maltby to associate director of integrated music and sports partnerships within the company's Artist Services group. "We're continuing to strengthen our team with exceptional talent at every level," said Lee Anderson, co-president of music at the agency. "David and Danielle bring significant experience and knowledge to our tour marketing operation, while Sophie's promotion reflects our commitment to developing talent from within. Each of these moves makes us better equipped to deliver for our artists." Meanwhile, Legends Global has appointed Aimee Carroll as president of merchandise, with the firm saying the hire will bring "two decades of brand-building leaderships across retail, fashion, and consumer goods". In the role, Carroll will oversee Legends Global's worldwide retail and merchandising platform, spanning eCommerce, in-venue retail, large-scale live events, brick-and-mortar operations, licensing, and branded solutions for an extensive lineup of global partners across sports and entertainment, Legends Global said. "With a track record of driving growth across some of the industry's most recognised brands, Aimee combines large-company experience with a strong commercial focus and a consumer-first mentality that will deliver results for our partners," said Legends Global president and CFO Brett Parker. Live Nation Belgium has also appointed Jean Jacques Velkeniers as its new managing director, effective from 1 September. "What we have built over the past years is the result of the dedication, passion, and hard work of an outstanding team. By welcoming Jean Jacques, we are adding valuable expertise, and I look forward to working alongside him and our management team," said Herman Schueremans, president of Live Nation Belgium. Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ's free email digest of essential live music industry news.

How TransUnion's AI findings should change the way seos pitch GEO. AI search visibility isn't a separate tooling problem. It's the same measurement blind spot CMOs already fund. Reframe GEO budget requests to win approval. Marketers are more confident about AI than they have ever been, and less able to prove it's working. That's the real story buried in a new TransUnion study, and it lines up almost exactly with what I've been finding while digging into the methodological gaps in B2B AI citation research this month. The same blind spot showing up in how brands measure AI-driven marketing is showing up in how they measure AI search visibility. Marketers are confident in AI, but not ready to measure it. TransUnion commissioned United Talent Agency's brand advisory division to survey 100 senior marketing and technology leaders at major U.S. brands. The company is calling the result a "confidence-readiness paradox." Eighty-nine percent of marketers expect their AI-enabled marketing investment to grow over the next 12 to 24 months, and 64% say they're confident they'll hit their AI goals. But only 42% rate their organization's people readiness as high, and just 36% say the same about data and process readiness. Fewer than half, 48%, say they have enough visibility into platform-level AI to make optimization decisions with confidence. I asked Matt Spiegel, executive vice-president of TruAudience Growth Strategy at TransUnion, to rank the three gaps the study identifies. "If I had to rank them, I'd put data first," Spiegel told me. "AI can compensate for a lot of things, but it can't compensate for incomplete or disconnected data. If you're feeding AI incomplete information, you're going to get outcomes that are less predictive than you hoped." Spiegel's argument is that people and process problems are downstream of the data problem. Once customer records, transaction history, and behavioral signals are actually connected, governance and skills follow. Without that foundation, he said, everything else gets harder. AI search is part of a larger measurement blind spot. Where this stops being a general marketing-ops story and starts being an SEO story is in what's driving the visibility gap. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said walled garden blind spots limit their ability to evaluate AI's effectiveness, and 70% said cross-channel blind spots make it hard to track AI's impact across the customer journey. Spiegel told me the pain isn't concentrated in any single platform. Marketers are running paid social, retail media, connected TV, search, and owned channels simultaneously, and no single environment shows the whole customer journey. I pushed him on whether AI search sits inside that same problem or outside it, since that's the exact fight I've been having with the current wave of AI citation studies. His answer confirmed what I suspected. "AI search is another example of why independent measurement is becoming more important," he said. As consumers increasingly discover brands through AI-generated answers instead of traditional search results, marketers lose visibility into how those recommendations get created and what influenced them. He called it a natural extension of the walled garden problem, not a separate one. Every AI citation and GEO study getting published right now, including ones that I've written about, is trying to reverse-engineer visibility into a system that was never built to be measured from the outside. TransUnion just handed me independent confirmation, from 100 marketing leaders with no stake in the SEO industry's internal arguments, that the same structural blindness is showing up everywhere AI mediates a customer decision. If you can't see inside a retail media auction, you can't see inside an AI Overview citation either. It's the same missing instrumentation, just pointed at a different channel. Treat GEO as a business measurement problem. This should change how SEO practitioners talk about GEO internally. Too much of the current conversation treats AI search visibility as its own isolated discipline with its own tooling problem. Spiegel's data suggests the opposite. It's a specific instance of a company-wide measurement failure that CMOs are already naming in board meetings, which means SEO teams that frame GEO as part of that broader conversation are going to get funded faster than ones asking for a citation-tracking tool in isolation. What SEO teams should do next. Here's how to apply that this quarter. First, stop pitching AI search visibility as a standalone SEO line item. Bring the TransUnion numbers, or your own version of them, into the next budget conversation and frame AI citation tracking as the search-specific piece of a measurement gap the CMO already knows exists. That reframing alone changes who signs off on the spend. Second, before buying another AI visibility tool, audit whether your existing customer data is connected enough to even use one well. Spiegel's advice to a team with a fresh AI budget was to spend the first dollar on data quality and identity resolution, not another application. The same logic applies to a GEO tool bought on top of fragmented analytics. It will report activity, not impact. Third, build incrementality testing into your AI search measurement now, before it becomes the standard everyone else adopts later. Spiegel pointed out that only a minority of marketers currently use marketing mix modeling or incrementality testing for AI, mostly because time and cost savings are easier to report. SEO teams that can show incremental traffic or conversion lift tied specifically to AI search citations, rather than just citation counts, will be the ones with credibility when this gets scrutinized at the executive level. Spiegel closed our conversation with a line I think is the real headline, more than anything in TransUnion's press release. The biggest mistake he sees isn't a bad AI strategy. It's leaders asking "what's our AI strategy" instead of "what business problem are we solving." I'd extend that straight into SEO. The teams still asking "how do we win more AI citations" without first asking what business outcome those citations are supposed to produce are going to end up with a lot of visibility and no way to prove it mattered. More Resources: