Warner Music Austria strikes a distribution deal with Tonherd

Warner Music Austria and ADA Central Europe have signed a distribution and studio partnership with Tonherd, a Vienna independent label, publisher and recording studio. The deal was announced on 27 August, and under it the two Warner units handle global distribution for Tonherd and provide strategic support for its roster at home and abroad.

The studio half is the part that makes it more than a distribution agreement. Warner Music Austria's own artists get direct access to Tonherd's room in Vienna's 9th district, which the company's website puts at 350 square metres across two control rooms.

Tonherd is run by Constantin Kaiser, Florian Koch and Valentin Bröderbauer, and the three split the work cleanly: Koch takes recording, mixing and mastering, Kaiser handles releases, distribution and promotion, and Bröderbauer covers songwriting, workshops and organisation. The announcement describes it as a full-service operation running from songwriting and production through to release, and credits the production team with work for Ina Regen, Josh. and Pizzera & Jaus. The studio's own site also credits it with co-recording work on the Dropkick Murphys album For the People.

The first release under the partnership comes from the pop artist Michael Russ, with records from ams and Fräulein Peter following later this year, plus one from Now., the Vienna band all three Tonherd founders play in.

Franz Pleterski, who has led Warner Music Austria since 2020, said the aim is to work with artists as partners from very early in their development, and to build a model of cooperation between the independent and major sectors that suits the current market rather than the one that produced the old one.

ADA Central Europe is the distribution and label services arm of Warner Music Central Europe, and it has been signing steadily. It took on global distribution, streaming strategy and marketing for the Berlin independent AIM Music in July, signed the German artist Fayan in April, and extended its arrangement with the Austrian duo Seiler und Speer in October 2024. Austria itself sits inside Warner Music Central Europe, which grew to six countries in October 2025 when WMG merged its recorded music businesses in Germany, Switzerland and Austria with those in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.

The deal is one more piece of a group that has been reorganising in several directions at once, from an 11 percent streaming gain in its calendar second quarter to a new tech hub in Bengaluru.