Doug Ford

earshot is a music production company founded by Doug Ford. Doug Ford was most recently the Director of Music and Product Programming at YouTube/YouTube Music, based in NYC. Doug oversaw a global team that developed and maintaine YouTube Music’s owned and operated playlist ecosystem,which is centered around premium playlists for every genre, mood, and moment of a user’s life, and includes high profile brands such as “RELEASED”, “The Hit List”, “Al Milion” and “On Everything”. Prior to that, Doug was the Senior Director and Head of Music Culture & Editorial for Spotify from 2013 to 2018. In his role he oversaw play listing teams cooperatively on a global level, and represented the Shows & Editorial team cross functionally with other global teams within Spotify. Doug was instrumental in helping bridge Human and Algorithmic curation at Spotify. Additionally, Doug was involved in recruiting and managing a significant portion of Spotify's Global Curation team, including all of Spotify's high profile Genre specialists. In addition to critical and foundational contributions to Spotify's overall playlist philosophy and ecosystem, Doug established "The Syndicate", a network playlist strategy that developed some of Spotify's biggest brands including Today’s Top Hits, New Music Friday, and RapCaviar. Doug began his career by writing, performing, touring, and recording as a multi-instrumentalist/vocalist. He helped create and manage a large residential recording facility in Upstate NY, working for many years as a producer/engineer for a large number of artists in multiple genres, and was VP of the studio's Grammy nominated indie record label. In 2000 Doug co founded a ground breaking and successful online predictive song testing company called HitPredictor which was subsequently sold to Clear Channel/iHeartRadio in 2010.