HERE'S WHAT’S UP WITH RICHARD SANDERS (UPDATE)

Those rampant rumors, it turns out, are true. We can confirm that Richard Sanders’ five-year run as Kobalt President is coming to an end. He'll stay on until the end of June.

Sanders will be succeeded by veteran publishing exec Laurent Hubert, who was brought in last year to run Kobalt’s recently launched B2B rights-management division. Hubert previously helped launch BMG Rights Management in the U.S. in 2009 and served as COO of the pubco’s North American operations until 2016.

Since January 2012, when Sanders was hired by Kobalt founder/CEO Willard Ahdritz, the company has aggressively pitched its "transparency" in digital collections and established a label-services division, while also acquiring the catalogs of veteran artists, including those of Beck, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham, Steve Winwood and The B-52’s, as well as current artists including ZAYN and Courtney Barnett.

Before taking the Kobalt gig, Sanders endured a series of problematic situations, heading international and global marketing during the turbulent Sony BMG era, dealing firsthand with the Big Mean Germans as RCA EVP/GM in the early 2000s and surviving the train wreck that was Richard Branson’s V2 in the 1990s.