The company, led by Barros and two-time Grammy winner Kitt Wakeley, says the industry’s challenge has shifted from uploading music to getting it heard
Photo Courtesy of Hitskope Music Group
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., Sept. 02, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Hitskope Music Group, the music distribution company founded by Danny Barros, is operating on a consolidated model that brings distribution, marketing, rights management, analytics, publishing, sync licensing, and artist services into a single operation, according to the company. The same operation handles copyright registration, licensing administration, and clearance, functions that are typically spread across separate providers and that the company says it has brought under one roof. Hitskope describes the model as an effort to reduce the number of separate intermediaries an artist works with across the life of a release.
The premise behind that structure, according to Barros, is that getting a song online stopped being the hard part years ago. In the company’s account, the difficulty in the current market is no longer publishing music but getting it noticed once it’s published. “It wasn’t really about selling out shows,” Barros said of his earliest work in music. “I just wanted people to connect with these bands the way I did.”
That earlier work, according to the company, began while Barros was still in high school, booking and promoting club shows before he was old enough to enter the venues himself. He went on to build his first company, D-Squared Entertainment, into a multi-state promotion business that staged shows for artists including Snoop Dogg, Ed Sheeran, Steve Aoki, and Chris Brown, before selling it to a Live Nation affiliate.
He then launched the first version of Hitskope, the company said, on a model built around short-term licensing, partnership economics, and artists retaining ownership of their work rather than signing it away. Under that structure, according to the company, rights remain with the artist rather than transferring to the label. That approach led to a joint venture with Sony and established a principle the company says still guides it: that an audience should be built first, with deals and infrastructure assembled around it.
The current operation began when Barros partnered with Kitt Wakeley, a two-time Grammy winner and seven-time Billboard No. 1 artist, according to the company. The arrangement places an established recording artist and a longtime music executive within the same organization, spanning both the creative and the commercial sides of the business. The consolidated services are intended to let artists manage distribution, rights, and promotion through one operation rather than coordinating multiple vendors, the company said. Among those functions, the company groups sync licensing, the placement of recorded music in other media, with its broader rights and publishing services.
A separate part of the platform, FanCut, allows fans to share in royalties and take a stake in the artists they back, the company said. According to Hitskope, the feature is intended to give audiences a more direct role in the artists they support than is typical in streaming.
Hitskope states that its leadership includes executives who previously worked at Atlantic, Elektra, EMI/Capitol, Sony RED, Downtown Records, 300 Entertainment, and Alamo Records, and that their credits include Grammys and billion-stream catalogs. The company frames that experience as central to its approach, emphasizing personnel over technology.
According to Barros, the company’s position is plain: putting music online is no longer the challenge; getting it heard is. Additional information about the company and its roster is available at hitskope.com.
About Hitskope Music Group
Hitskope Music Group is a music distribution company founded by Danny Barros that consolidates distribution, marketing, rights management, analytics, publishing, sync licensing, and artist services — along with copyright registration, licensing administration, and clearance — into a single operation. Its model is built on short-term licensing, partnership economics, and artists retaining ownership of their work, an approach that led to a joint venture with Sony. A separate feature, FanCut, lets fans share in royalties and take a stake in the artists they back.
The company is led by Barros alongside two-time Grammy winner and seven-time Billboard No. 1 artist Kitt Wakeley, with a leadership team drawn from Atlantic, Elektra, EMI/Capitol, Sony RED, Downtown Records, 300 Entertainment, and Alamo Records, whose credits include Grammys and billion-stream catalogs. More information is available at hitskope.com
Contact Information:
Contact Person’s Name: Kitt Wakeley
Organization / Company: Hitskope Music Group
Company website: hitskope.com
Contact Email Address: [email protected]
City, State / Province, Country, Zip Code: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States,
Phone: +1 (405) 550-1750
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/16a64f75-a7d0-4c40-ba02-04588f8511ab
