For the last two years, Alex Luke has served as Director of Global Programming & Content strategy for Amazon Music.
He’s also been a Partner at The Valley Fund, a Silicon Valley VC focused on digital technologies for the benefit of broadcast media.
Now, Luke is leaving Amazon — and taking a plum gig at Pandora.
Not bad for a guy who 25 years ago scored his first big job in the radio and music industries by landing the Program Director post at KPNT-FM 105.7 “The Point” in St. Louis.
Alex Luke is now serving as SVP/Digital Content for both SiriusXM and its recently acquired Pandora service. Luke will lead programming for Pandora and editorial content on both the Pandora and SiriusXM digital platforms.
It’s a newly created position, and Luke will serve under Sirius XM President/Chief Content Officer Scott Greenstein.
Luke will also manage the Pandora Content Team. The team, created by Greenstein shortly after the acquisition of Pandora earlier this year, focuses on applying SiriusXM’s curation model and programming to the Pandora platform. The team develops original content in music, sports, and talk content ranging across comedy, politics, and entertainment for Pandora listeners, including a selection of SiriusXM content, as well as creating original Pandora content for the SiriusXM audience.
And, it is a major coup for Pandora as it seeks to regain market share as Spotify has emerged as the go-to source for on-demand music, and iHeartRadio seeks a greater presence in the digital audio space.
It’s also a blow for Amazon Music, which has struggled somewhat to capture a greater share of the digital audio ear.
In 1997, Luke left KPNT to become PD of WKQX-FM “Q101” in Chicago, where he spent two years. In 1999, he exited for a music industry job before taking an on-air shift at pioneering Alternative KROQ-FM in Los Angeles in 2001. After two years there, Luke shifted to Napster, where he spent the following two years as VP of Music Programming.
From 2003-2011, he was at Apple, as Director of Music Programming and Label Relations.
But, he left Silicon Valley at that time, and went back to L.A. for a record label job, as EVP of A&R for EMI Music.
That lasted until 2013, when he joined The Valley Fund.
He took his now-former Amazon role in 2017.
