Sr. Director, Digital Development - Columbia

United States, New York, New York

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At Sony Music Entertainment, we fuel the creative journey. We’ve played a pioneering role in music history, from the first‑ever music label to the invention of the flat disc record. We’ve nurtured some of music’s most iconic artists and produced some of the most influential recordings of all time.

Today, we work in more than 70 countries, supporting a diverse roster of international superstars, developing and independent artists, and visionary creators. From our position at the intersection of music, entertainment, and technology, we bring imagination and expertise to the newest products and platforms, embrace new business models, employ breakthrough tools, and provide powerful insights that help our artists push creative boundaries and reach new audiences.

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The Senior Director, Digital Development at Columbia Records builds the viral foundation for projects before they scale. Where the wider Viral Marketing team drives influencer campaigns at volume around established artists and priority singles, this role sits at the front end: developing artists, first singles, early‑stage projects, and catalog titles showing early signals of movement.

The work is diagnostic, strategic, and hands‑on. Read the audience quickly, map the niches that matter, find and test the content that actually works inside them, and run point on the seeding that puts it in front of the right communities. Once a project has traction and a proven approach, it transitions to a Viral Marketing lead to scale further. The role sits within the Viral Marketing team at Columbia Records and works alongside Marketing, Audience and Social teams from project kickoff.

• Own the viral strategy for developing artists and early‑stage projects, from pre‑release through the first signs of traction, before campaigns move into scaled execution.
• Build a fast, accurate read on each project’s audience: who they are, where they sit online, what they already engage with, and what the artist’s credible entry point is.
• Map and pressure‑test the niches and creator communities around a project (subcultures, formats, sounds, references) and identify where the artist has real cultural permission to land.
• Identify and test content angles inside those niches at low cost and high frequency. Prove what works before budget scales.
• Run point on seeding strategy and execution for early‑stage projects: set the seeding plan, choose the communities and accounts, brief the content, and place it. This is hands‑on work, not oversight.
• Build and maintain the seeding infrastructure the front end of a campaign depends on: page networks, community accounts, creator relationships, and the process for moving content through them quickly.
• Establish the creative foundation each campaign scales from: the hook, the format, the angle, the seeding logic, documented clearly enough for the wider Viral team to run with it.
• Work closely with the Catalog and Legacy divisions to surface titles showing early signals of growth, and build viral strategies around them fast enough to catch the moment.
• Monitor catalog and recent releases for emergent movement (UGC velocity, sound usage, search and DSP behavior, playlist and platform signals) and flag opportunities proactively rather than reactively.
• Partner with Marketing, Audience and Social from kickoff so viral strategy is built into the campaign, not bolted on afterward.
• Build early relationships with creators and micro‑communities relevant to developing projects, where fit matters more than…