Former Apple Music exec joins crypto firm Ledger as head of NFT division

Apple Music veteran Parker Todd Brooks is leaving the company to join Ledger, one of the biggest providers of cryptocurrency hardware wallets.

According to a Friday announcement, Brooks will now head Ledger’s nonfungible token division as the company expands its support for the storage, display, management and security of NFT pieces.

Brooks is joining Ledger after spending the last seven years with Apple Music, helping launch Apple Music and music radio station Beats 1 after Beats Music was acquired by Apple in 2014. Prior to his role at Beats Music as director of artist integrations, he worked at Topspin Media, leading its integration into Beats Music and Spotify.

In his new position as Ledger’s vice president of NFTs, Brooks will be responsible for bridging the platform with the artistic community and developing NFT management products. He will also make sure that NFTs are “given priority across Ledger’s software and hardware platforms,” Ledger wrote in the announcement.

“I’ve spent my career serving the artist community. With NFTs there is an opportunity to reimagine how art and music are created, sampled, and managed while simultaneously addressing the security issues in storing NFTs on internet-connected devices,” Brooks said. The Apple Music veteran noted that his mission will be “simplifying the process to help artists showcase and manage their digital works, and to securely store them.”

Ian Rogers, chief experience officer of Ledger, told Cointelegraph that securing NFTs is “nothing new for Ledger,” as the company provides a secure way to access accounts on more than 100 different blockchains. “Most NFTs are currently available on Ethereum. To store these NFTs, you need a blockchain account the same way you would store cryptocurrencies. NFTs are just a new type of digital assets,” he said.

A major supplier of hardware wallets designed for secure storage of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC), Ledger has been apparently trying to keep up with the ongoing NFT boom. “With the increased interest in NFTs, we have an increasing demand from our customers for supporting NFTs as a first-class citizen within Ledger Live, which Parker and his team will help us to deliver on,” Rogers noted.