As Global Head of Music Publishing at YouTube, Carletta Higginson spearheads YouTube’s global music publishing licensing strategy and builds and maintains strategic relationships with major publishers, collection societies and PROs globally on behalf of YouTube. Her role includes negotiating complex digital licensing and partnership agreements, managing existing partnerships, launching new relationships, driving new business opportunities, resolving business and operational issues, and analyzing and tracking key metrics. In addition, Carletta oversees the development of various initiatives to help creatively support songwriters, producers and publishers on the platform.

Prior to joining Google in 2013, Carletta was a seasoned professional with almost a decade of content, media and entertainment-related business and legal experience with a deep understanding of the global music rights landscape. After graduating from NYU in 1999 and Columbia Law School in 2003, Carletta began her legal career as a securities litigator before transitioning to specialize in the content, media and entertainment space and becoming a partner at Jenner & Block LLP in 2011. At Jenner, Carletta focused her practice on litigating copyright, contractual and other disputes in the entertainment industry, with particular emphasis on disputes arising in the recording and music publishing industries. She handled matters resulting in precedent-setting decisions in copyright law and successfully defended copyright
owners in a variety of copyright infringement actions, ranging from cases involving music sampling to rights in renewal terms, and protected their copyrights against the operators of file-sharing websites. She also successfully represented content owners in contractual disputes covering such topics as tortious interference with contract, artist/management disputes, accounting claims, licensing disputes, and in claims of misappropriation of trade secrets and unfair competition.

Carletta is a member of the Whitman Circle of the Brooklyn Public Library and is on the Advisory Board for Sound Thinking NYC. She was a 2012 Fellow of the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity and a 2015 Leadership Music alum, as well as recognized in 2018 and 2020 by Billboard Magazine as one of the most powerful Women in Music and named one of Variety’s “New York Women of Impact” in 2022.