UP208: Simon Bazalgette

Richard  first met Simon Bazalgette when he was chief executive of The Jockey Club, the organisation that owns some of the UK’s biggest racecourses including Aintree, Epsom and Cheltenham.  But this isn’t really a conversation about horse-racing, because Bazalgette was very early to some of the big themes that we talk about on this podcast. things like media streaming services, data, betting, financial models and digital publishing. His career really took off in the music business, when he was one of the founders of Music Choice Europe, an early digital music platform and was one of the darlings of the first dotcom boom when it floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2000, boasting 14million subscribers and was a forerunner of today’s music streaming and digital radio industry. Simon is a non-executive director of the EFL was a senior independent director of the World Athletics Championships in London in 2017 and is a member of the Sports Board of the NSPCC.    And if you don’t already get the weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter, you can join thousands of busy sports biz execs who receive it direct to their inbox every Thursday, subscribe via unofficialpartner.comUnofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.