William Bailey

William Bailey is Co-Founder and CEO of Bolero, a Paris-based financial services company he co-founded in 2021 that enables individuals and institutions to invest in tokenized music rights. Bolero's platform facilitates the buying and selling of publishing and master rights in the form of Song Shares and Catalog Shares, with the stated goal of creating a liquid, transparent asset class from music rights. Bailey has described the core problem as one of untradeable rights: artists and publishers hold rights tied to the commercial distribution of works — a market representing $41.5 billion annually — but those rights have historically lacked liquidity or tradability. Bolero's infrastructure uses blockchain to address this, allowing artists to monetize their catalogs without surrendering creative control.

Bailey's path to Bolero began during the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020, when contact with friends in the music industry who lost income overnight prompted him to examine the structure of music rights. He co-founded Bolero with Arthur Amon, whom he met at a Le Wagon coding bootcamp. Prior to Bolero, Bailey worked as a Product Manager at Smartly.ai, a conversational AI SaaS company, from 2017 to 2020. Earlier roles include a production assistant position at Filmworks Group in Dubai and a corporate services role at Endemol Shine Group. He holds a Master's degree in Innovation Management — Technologies and Entrepreneurship from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. In 2025, he was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in the Entertainment category, and in 2026 to the Entrepreneur Choiseul 200 list in Economy and Business.