Fred Goldring

FRED GOLDRING is an entrepreneur, strategic adviser and investor in media, technology, and brand marketing and development enterprises. He is also a former top music and entertainment industry lawyer, an Emmy-winning Executive Producer with will.i.am of the Yes We Can video, a longtime Huffington Post contributor, industry commentator, a Member of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities appointed by President Obama, and a musician (who was a guitarist in the TED House Band for the 2012 TED Conference in Long Beach).

He is Co-Founder and Chairman of Aficionado Media which is a multi-media tablet-based social media platform with curated and aggregated content for affluent adult enthusiasts who share a passionate area of interest in pursuit of a lifelong skill.

Fred is also a Strategic Advisory Board Member of several companies including Mandalay Media, Jawbone and Brooklyn Water Enterprises. Fred was a Co-Founder of Big Champagne (which sold to Live Nation), Co-Founder of Digital Turbine (which sold to Mandalay Media) and has been a strategic adviser to Gibson Guitars, Hasbro, McDonald’s, National Geographic Entertainment, Tapulous (creators of Tap Tap Revenge which sold to Disney) and MP3.com.

Fred previously spent several decades practicing entertainment law as one of the top deal-making attorneys in the entertainment industry (with a focus on the music and new media businesses) as a founding partner of the Beverly Hills, CA-based boutique law firm Goldring, Hertz, & Lichtenstein LLP which represented many of the most important and biggest selling recording and performing artists in the world. As a transactional attorney, Fred was critical in the signing of many of his firm’s clients’ original record, TV and film deals and he also helped them to make the significant leap into other areas of the entertainment business. He and his partners were also widely recognized as being amongst the first people in the music industry to recognize, evangelize and embrace the seismic technological shift that is the digital music revolution.

Fred was appointed by President Barack Obama as a Member of The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and was sworn-in as a Member by Justice Stephen Breyer at the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. in February 2010.

Fred currently serves as a Member of the Board of Advisors of The Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics (COLE) at the Fuqua Business School at Duke University.

Fred is the former Chairman of the Board of Directors of Rock The Vote, and he was the Executive Producer with will.i.am of the groundbreaking Yes We Can music video, for which Fred received an Emmy Award, a Clio Award, a Global Media Award, and an NAACP Image Award.

Fred was also a Co-Executive Producer of the documentary film/music project The People Speak based on Howard Zinn’s seminal work, The People’s History of the United States, and he was a Producer of the Soundtrack Album from the hit television series Thirtysomething.

In 2002, Fred and his former law partner Ken Hertz received the Bill of Rights Award from the ACLU for their extraordinary commitment to social justice. Fred was previously the Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Bogart Pediatric Cancer Research Programs in Los Angeles.

Fred has authored numerous articles for The Huffington Post, is a frequent speaker and commentator on the subjects of entertainment, marketing, media, technology, and politics in numerous publications including The New York Times, and has been an instructor at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management. He is a longtime member of the TED community having attended the prestigious conference since 1995, and at the 2010 Ted Conference he delivered a TED TALK on the Safe Shake (which he literally co-created at the conference 24 hours before with Eric Hirshberg).

Fred is a member of the California and New York bars, and is a graduate of Duke University and the University of Miami School of Law where he founded The Entertainment and Sports Law Society and was the First Prize Winner of the ASCAP Nathan Burkan Memorial Writing Competition. Fred is a co-founder of DEMAN, the Duke Entertainment Media and the Arts Network. He is a 22-year voting member of The Recording Academy.