EXCLUSIVE: Matthew Rogers Announces Exit From UNIFIED Group: ‘I Don't Think We Ever Minded Not Having A Moment To Breathe’

After 14 years with independent Australian company UNIFIED Music Group, longtime Chief Operating Officer Matthew Rogers has announced his exit.

With the company having emerged from founder Jaddan Comerford’s Boomtown Records label which first launched in the early ‘00s, UNIFIED was established in 2011, with Rogers having been involved from right at the beginning. However, his ties go back even further than the company’s immediate life.

Hailing from Brisbane originally, Rogers spent his formative years as a self-described “young skate punk” before moving to Melbourne in 2005 to work with Media Arts Lawyers. Meeting Comerford as one of his first clients, a few years later spent at Mushroom Group soon coincided with Comerford explaining his plans for the new company, which would feature label services alongside publishing, recorded music, and artist management arms.

For Rogers, the company’s vision was in line with his ideals as a lawyer with the skate punk ethos he had grown up with.

“I was a terrible singer for a punk rock band and realised that I had it in my brain and not my mouth, this ability to work with artists and look after artists,” he explains. “I always saw the ability and capacity to help translate that protection of copyright, rights, what an artist has created, their creative output, and being able to help protect that through the process, to make sure that the art is properly compensated properly and adequately compensated.

“My intent was always to be able to help those artists.”

This passion was noticed by Comerford, who saw Rogers as a perfect fit for the company in its earliest days. While their professional relationship already stretched back a few years, their shared love of music and the desire to help artists was what resonated most.

“Having someone that was able to essentially help us run the business from a behind-the-scenes perspective and make sure that we had all of the things covered so that we could do all the things that we do with running labels and managing artists and stuff like that was really important. 

“Matt really helped build that backbone of UNIFIED so we could be a really strong business.”

Rogers initially joined UNIFIED as their General Manager, describing his role within the company as being “the glue that picks up everything”. In mid 2017, his role was changed to UNIFIED’s Chief Operating Officer, allowing him to build teams underneath the areas he already looked after. This resulted in close to eight years spent curating strong teams that looked after the likes of legal, IT, HR, and the myriad back-end components of the business.

“That step up was the ability to then focus on the strategy of what Jaddan and UNIFIED were looking at and have been looking at for the last 10 – 14 years, and to be able to really focus my mind on that component as opposed to just day to day practicalities in the business,” he explains.

Of course, having a sharp legal mind undoubtedly positioned Rogers well to take on a role such as this, with his background allowing him to help the company operate to its full potential.

“I think the It helps the framework of the business, especially since we are a business that is quite diverse in what we function and where we function,” he explains. “We operate internationally, we have multiple companies in the US, companies in the UK, and through that, there's the need to really understand the financial and legal framework for a business.

“I've always found that I've been quite a commercially-minded lawyer,” he adds. “So being able to take that financial and business ethic, but have an underpinning of what the law is, how to operate as a business, and what constraints you have as a business has been important.”

To put it simply, Rogers’ time at UNIFIED has been – in the best way – hectic. The company has experienced massive growth in the past 14 years. Alongside the international expansion Rogers alluded to, UNIFIED launched its 24Hundred merch store in 2013, kicked off the Unify Gathering festival the following year, and went even further thanks to the addition of its UNIFY Presents touring company. That’s just in its first five years alone.

Meanwhile, the musicians the company worked with were kicking massive goals as well, with names like Violent Soho, Vance Joy, The Amity Affliction, Teen Jesus & The Jean Teasers, and many more becoming key players in the Australian music scene, and elevating the company’s efforts in the public eye, too.

Rogers will be the first to tell you though, it’s a pretty nice problem to have.

“I don't think we ever minded not having a moment to breathe,” he explains. “As a bootstrap company, you run at a hundred miles an hour and you enjoy running at a hundred miles an hour. It takes a certain type of person to really thrive in this type of environment. It’s bloody hard, but it's also a lot of fun because you control all of your destiny. 

“We could have stopped at any moment and pulled back, but we don't like to, and I think it's the intrinsic kind of nature of how certain people are built that we didn't really have a moment to breathe because we actually were enjoying breathing while we're having a whole lot of fun.

“The breathing happens when you see people running in to Unify for the first time,” he continues. “The breathing happens when you're flying overseas constantly to meet the team or to represent the company in what you have said are the goals for the business as opposed to what has been set by a corporate office thousands of miles away.”

The question does become though, as Rogers makes his way out of UNIFIED, what are the things he’ll remember most? The highlights from his time at the company that he takes pride in? Expectantly, it’s a difficult question to answer, especially when almost every day feels like a highlight.

On one hand, it’s witnessing the dizzying heights experienced by longtime close friends, and the hard work that has been put into seeing this success. On the other, it’s the massive impact that UNIFIED and its myriad operations have had upon the wider community. Together, it makes for an impressive highlight reel.

“I was friends with a number of the Violent Soho guys when I was in the Brisbane music scene, I worked with them at Media Arts, they then signed to Mushroom and I got to work with them there,” he explains. “After I came to UNIFIED, we started managing them and they had the tremendous success of Hungry Ghost, and seeing that band and those people be able to live so much of an incredible life and deliver on so much on their promise that they'd had playing back in Ric's in the mid-’00s is incredible.

“Joel Birch of The Amity Affliction and I were friends since the early ‘00s, and seeing them take those steps and be led along the way through by Jaddan, by Luke Logemann, Nick Yates, and now Caleb Williams – being able to see them succeed on a global scale is why I got out of playing music and into the business side of it.”

For many fans of the artists and events that UNIFIED are involved with, arguably one of the most visible is that of Unify Gathering, which swiftly became a staple of the annual festival scene. For Rogers, the impact of the festival on the local community was immeasurable.

“I remember having a meeting with the community after one of the events and telling them that we're going to move the site,” he recalls. “They’re up in arms at the meeting going, ‘How dare you! You can't move the site, you'll kill the festival, it'll be the worst thing ever’. And we said, ‘Oh, we're just moving it 5 km down the road to a bigger site.’

“It had become such an important part of the community,” he adds. “The people, the community-building there that had gone on, the way that the footy club had been able to buy a bus and then put solar panels on the roof… All of these things kind of meant so much to the community, so seeing that play out was pretty special. It went beyond them being fearful of all of these tattooed people coming into their town but afterwards they just became an important part of the lifeblood of that town and that community.”

Rogers will make his exit from the company on February 28th – his 14th anniversary with UNIFIED – ending an impressive run looking after one of Australia’s greatest musical success stories. His departure is more than amicable, of course, with Rogers instead looking forward to new experiences, highlights, and – most importantly – professional challenges.

“I think I've always loved the challenges in the business and loved all the challenges that we've undertaken,” he explains. “I’ve really been thinking about that next challenge in life and I built a really strong team here and felt that we've accomplished so many things that I was just turning my mind to what those next challenges are in terms of personal and career growth.

“I've always loved working internationally,” he adds. “I've always loved working in the business, and I felt now was a chance to spread my wings and find those opportunities that can take me and challenge me. I'm not saying I'm comfortable, or that I know everything, but I think mentally we always need to be stimulated and we always need to find progression, and I just felt that I can do that at this stage in my career.”

Rogers’ impending exit will undoubtedly see him missed by the wider UNIFIED team, with Comerford likely feeling his absence more than anyone else.

“Our relationship began with him constructing our initial legal agreements and went to essentially signing the artists and building the business, so to be able to then do it together was amazing,” Comerford explains. “Our friendship had already grown from there, but to be able to work with your friend, and work with our wider friends to do the things that we do, to travel overseas together, to go to shows together and to be doing business together is a lot of fun.

“In a lot of ways, these things start off like dreams, and in a lot of ways they still are dreams,” he adds. “The dream of working in the music industry is still very real to me, but I guess the thing is, it actually is real now. We do work in the music industry. So doing it with Matt the last 14 years has been incredible. It's a shame that it's going to end, but I think we're going to be ending on a high, and we can be very proud of everything we've achieved together.”

However, while Rogers’ exit is bittersweet for Comerford and UNIFIED, it presents new opportunities for the leadership team, and for the company to continue to move forward and grow.

“I tried to convince Matt to not leave, but once I realised that he wanted to do this, I was supportive of it,” Comerford explains. “As he says, we have an amazing team that he has been a huge part of building over the years. So I think if anything, it just allows us an opportunity to show the depth of the leadership within the business because we're going to see maybe some faces that we haven't seen as much before from an industry perspective really step into these bigger responsibilities. 

“Although it's sort of bittersweet, it is really an opportunity for the business to sort of grow and for our culture to really emerge in this new chapter,” he adds. “We're going to look forward, move into the future, and continue to build this great company.”

For Rogers though, his first steps outside of the world of UNIFIED won’t be too far from what’s expected of him. Plans for helping out a wine-making friend for the 2025 picking and harvesting season will come first, with plenty of time to be spent with his family. However, the allure of the music world won’t be too far away either.

“We're at an interesting point in music technology, the interaction with technology and how we do that, so I think being able to spend some time reading and understanding  where that next phase of music disruption is going to come from is something that I'm entirely fascinated by,” he explains. “I don't think we always stop and take in what's happening around us as much as we should. 

“I've had some early conversations with some super interesting businesses, and I love the intersection between music and technology and Australian companies that work internationally,” he adds. “So I'll continue some conversations, but I’m just excited to have a moment mid-career, to hang out with my kids and hang out on my farm.”