The music industry has never been an easy place to navigate. For every breakout story, there are dozens of young artists left wondering why their streaming checks don’t cover the rent or why the viral moment they dreamed of fizzled after a few weeks. That reality is exactly why Sophie Steele, founder of Kopius Media, has dedicated her career to helping musicians build real infrastructure around their art.
Sophie’s path to running an agency wasn’t a traditional MBA-to-corporate pipeline story. She started as an artist herself, recording and releasing music before discovering just how fragmented and often predatory the business side of the industry could be.
Photo credit: Tabitha Turner Visuals
“I started as a recording artist and was really passionate about creating music since I was maybe nine,” Sophie told me. “I got into releasing music, wound up getting a single deal with an indie label that was facilitated by a bigger label… and realized the business side of music was pretty broken up and fragmented to the point where people weren’t getting paid.”
That reality hit her directly. Instead of giving up, she dove in.
“I really took that opportunity of not getting paid out appropriately to get immersed in how the intellectual property that is music makes money. I started learning about the back-end royalties, metadata, and the role they play in getting paid. All the unattractive, boring stuff that artists never want to do. Including myself at the time. But I thought, hey, if not me, then who?”
That question turned into a business. Sophie went from managing her own royalties to helping peers with metadata, registrations, and admin tasks. Word spread, referrals poured in, and Kopius Media was born. Today, her agency has run campaigns generating over a billion impressions for …
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Author: Kyle Rosner / High Times
