Sherrese Clarke Soares

Founder and Chief Executive Officer HarbourView Equity Partners

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Sherrese Clarke Soares founded HarbourView Equity Partners in 2021 to do something the capital markets had been circling for years without quite institutionalising: treat entertainment intellectual property, above all music catalogues, as a proper alternative asset class. A song that continues to earn streaming and publishing royalties decades after release produces a long-duration, broadly inflation-resistant cash flow that behaves rather like an infrastructure asset, and HarbourView exists to buy those cash flows, manage them actively, and hold them for institutional investors. The firm’s holdings include catalogues associated with artists such as Bruno Mars, Nelly, and Justin Bieber, and its capital comes from institutions including KKR and Apollo. Clarke Soares arrived at this from the structuring side rather than from the music industry: fifteen years at Morgan Stanley, latterly running its Entertainment, Media and Sports Structured Solutions Platform and serving as Deputy Chair of the firm’s Capital Commitment Committee, preceded by a founding role in CIT Group’s entertainment practice and followed by founding and leading Tempo Music.

Career Highlights

• Founded HarbourView Equity Partners in 2021 and built it into a leading institutional acquirer of music catalogues and entertainment royalty streams, backed by institutions including KKR and Apollo.
• Spent roughly fifteen years at Morgan Stanley, making Managing Director in 2009 and leading the Entertainment, Media and Sports Structured Solutions Platform, with oversight of more than 85 billion dollars in loan commitments and a seat as Deputy Chair of the Capital Commitment Committee.
• Founded and led Tempo Music as Chief Executive Officer and board director, securing backing from Providence Equity Partners and a strategic partnership with Warner Music Group.
• One of three founding senior leaders who built CIT Group’s Entertainment Practice, overseeing a portfolio of around one billion dollars.
• Extended HarbourView beyond music into film, television, and sport, including an 85 million dollar investment in the AI-powered children’s media company Animaj and a minority investment in Charles D. King’s MACRO.
• Named to the ForbesBLK 50 Money Masters list in 2026, and previously recognised with Billboard’s 2021 Change Agent award, Buyouts Women in Private Equity in 2022, and places on Essence Power Players and The Root 100.
• Former board member of Evoqua Holdings, board trustee of Carnegie Hall, and board member and Treasurer of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Professional Journey

Clarke Soares grew up in Queens, New York, the daughter of Jamaican parents who came to the United States in the 1970s; her father Desmond drove a taxi and invested in real estate. She read finance at Georgetown University, took an MBA at Harvard Business School, and began her career in finance as an intern at Morgan Stanley, the firm where she would spend the bulk of her working life.

Along the way she was one of three founding senior leaders who established CIT Group’s entertainment practice, building it into a portfolio of roughly a billion dollars. Entertainment lending is a specialist discipline because the collateral is not a building or a receivable but a stream of future royalties whose value depends on distribution economics that have been rewritten repeatedly, from physical sales to downloads to streaming. Learning to underwrite that is the foundation of everything she has done since.

At Morgan Stanley she became a Managing Director in 2009 and ultimately led the Entertainment, Media and Sports Structured Solutions Platform, the group responsible for structuring financing against exactly those kinds of assets. Her remit extended well past her own sector: she oversaw more than 85 billion dollars in loan commitments and served as Deputy Chair of the firm’s Capital Commitment Committee, the body that decides what risk the bank is prepared to underwrite. Holding both a specialist franchise and a firm-wide risk seat is unusual, and it gave her a view of how institutional capital actually gets allocated.

She left to found Tempo Music, backed by Providence Equity Partners and operating in strategic partnership with Warner Music Group, serving as its chief executive and a board director. Tempo was an early vehicle for the thesis she would later pursue at scale, buying music rights with institutional money at a time when catalogue valuations were rising sharply and the buyer base was still forming.

In 2021 she founded HarbourView Equity Partners, this time as owner of the platform rather than as its hired chief executive. The firm acquires music catalogues and other entertainment and media intellectual property, and its argument to institutional allocators is that these are durable, uncorrelated, long-duration cash flows that had historically been mispriced because the buyers who understood the assets lacked capital and the buyers who had capital lacked the expertise to value them. HarbourView has since broadened from music into film, television, and sport, with investments including 85 million dollars into Animaj, the AI-powered children’s media company, and a minority stake in MACRO, the media company founded by Charles D. King. She leads a team that includes chief strategy, compliance, investments, capital markets, and people officers, plus a set of operating partners and advisers.

Her recognition has come from both finance and entertainment, an unusual pairing: Billboard’s Change Agent award in 2021, Buyouts’ Women in Private Equity in 2022, the ForbesBLK 50 Money Masters list in 2026, and places on Essence Power Players and The Root 100. She sits as a board trustee of Carnegie Hall and on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where she serves as Treasurer and chairs the finance committee, and she previously sat on the board of the public water treatment company Evoqua Holdings.

Education

Georgetown University

Bachelor of Science, Finance

Harvard Business School

MBA