As the retail video market expanded in the 90’s, Sony Music identified an opportunity in the preschool content category and established Sony Wonder, a label dedicated to non-theatrical kids' video and audio programming.
Steve joined Sony Wonder in a retail marketing and distribution capacity, as part of a team that built a vertical infrastructure within Sony Music to fortify the company’s expanding kids' content business.
In this role, he led collaborations with licensors and key retail accounts (mass, grocery/drug, specialty) on brand and title-specific marketing, merchandising, and promotional activities supporting a catalog of over 1000 titles.
Steve’s tenure at Sony Wonder grew to encompass all marketing, content acquisitions, and business development. In this capacity, he worked with artists, licensors, producers, and internal Sony Music divisions on new content initiatives, evaluated and secured new programming, and developed and executed product launch strategies across all revenue channels.
In 2007, Steve transitioned Sony Wonder from the music company to Sony Pictures, rebranding it as the studio’s dedicated kids' division. At Sony Pictures, he developed an acquisitions practice for non-theatrical kids' content, integrated the catalog with the studio’s release cycles, and served as a creative executive on multiple productions, including the first animated film adapted from the Playmobil toy property.
At the heart of the Sony Wonder content portfolio was a co-production deal with Sesame Workshop, one of the world's most prominent nonprofit organizations, to produce and distribute Sesame Street specials and music releases. The collaboration focused on developing product concepts that combined Sesame Street characters and existing library footage with new productions featuring celebrity talent. In all, Sony Wonder collaborated with Sesame Workshop on the release of 350 titles across video and audio platforms.
Sony Wonder's agreement with Sesame Workshop and direct access to mass merchant accounts created a company with significant market share in non-theatrical kid's programming, which the company leveraged into distribution agreements with multiple branded children’s content partners.
Over the course of Steve's tenure with Sony Music and Sony Wonder, the label secured distribution rights to many of the most prominent branded kid's content portfolios in the industry, via licensors such as PBS, Random House, Nickelodeon and Classic Media.
As the kid’s and family music label, Sony Wonder also produced and distributed a library of audio releases featuring artists across the Sony Music family of labels, including Kenny Loggins, Tony Bennett, Art Garfunkel and Keb’ Mo’.
The launch of Napster in 1999 posed an existential threat to the record industry, which saw American CD sales peak at nearly $15 billion that year. The economic disruption from Napster and other file-sharing sites led to a nearly 30% decline in CD revenue by 2005, prompting music companies to divest non-core assets, including Sony Music's kids' content label, Sony Wonder.
In 2007, Steve moved the Sony Wonder label from Sony Music to Sony Pictures Entertainment to unify the studio’s family and kids' content under a single brand. This included acquiring distribution rights to existing properties and developing and producing new content. Sony Wonder came to encompass the studio’s major family feature film franchises and a library of non-theatrical kids' content.
