Richard Perna

Richard Perna is a veteran journeyman, well-traveled in the world of music. In a career that has spanned four decades, Richard has achieved both notoriety and success. From administrator to song-plugger, to licensing agent, to auditor, to aggregator to CEO, Richard has traversed every aspect of music publishing and master recording rights. During his career as a Music Publisher he has negotiated, signed or acquired, the ownership, or administration rights, to copyrights written and/or recorded by numerous artists, who include The Oak Ridge Boys, The Statler Brothers, Leon Russell, The Bellamy Brothers, ZZ Top, Roy Orbison, Warren Zevon, The Ramones, Taylor Swift, and many more. As VP/COO of Bill Ham’s Hamstein Music Group (1987 -2002), Richard negotiated and signed numerous exclusive songwriter contracts with ZZ Top, Clint Black, Little Texas, Tom Shapiro (BMI Country Songwriter of the decade 90’s), Jerry Lynn Williams, Tony Martin, Stephen Allen Davis, and many more successful songwriters. He has a keen understanding of the financial and marketing aspects related to signing and developing songwriters, especially in this evolving digital age. In 2002 HMG was sold to Mosaic Media Group in a lucrative multi-million dollar transaction. As Co-CEO, and co-owner, of Evergreen Copyrights (2005 - 2010), Richard negotiated and acquired the rights from 24 pre-existing companies, during which time Evergreen and became one of the top independent music publishers in the world, before its acquisition, in a successful multi-million dollar deal, by BMG. Some of the song rights acquired by Richard and Evergreen during this period include the works of Bill Monroe, JJ Cale, Nick Drake, Todd Rundgren, Teddy Riley, MC Hammer, Tupac Shakur, Richard Thompson, John Martyn, BB Winans, Bunny Siegler, Bruce Fischer (“You Are So Beautiful”) Sidney Cox (writer for Allison Krauss), Michael Bradford (Uncle Kracker), Stephen Jenkins (Third Eye Blind), and Mark Leonard (“Missing You”). In 2017 Richard formed Song Research & Recovery Services, LLC with noted entertainment attorney and business partner Stephen Easley. SR&RS specializes in assisting songwriters and their heirs in recovering their songs, through the timely filing of “Termination Notices” with music publishers to recover certain rights from those publishers. SR&RS also specializes in providing analytical and due diligence services to aggregators and sellers of music publishing rights, songwriter income streams, master recording rights, and artist and producer income streams.