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Sherrese Clarke Soares grew up listening to her father explain real estate transactions and debt financing over the kitchen table. Desmond Clarke was a Jamaican immigrant who drove a taxi while attending community college, then built a real estate brokerage from nothing. His daughter absorbed every word. She was also a classically trained pianist and a child actor, someone who loved the arts as much as she loved the structure of a deal. That combination, culture and capital, would eventually define one of the most consequential careers in the history of entertainment investing.
Clarke Soares earned a finance degree from Georgetown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She joined Morgan Stanley straight out of Georgetown as an analyst in equity capital markets, contributing to major equity transactions and IPOs. Over the next 15 years, she rose through the firm in several roles, ultimately becoming a Managing Director leading the Entertainment, Media and Sports Structured Solutions Platform. In that role, she designed a cross-asset strategy focused on capital solutions for intellectual property. She managed the origination and execution of more than $85 billion in loan commitments and served as Deputy Chair of the Capital Commitment Committee.
From Morgan Stanley to tempo music
Leaving a 15-year career at one of the world's most powerful investment banks is not a decision most people make twice. Clarke Soares made it once, then built something, and then did it again.
Her first venture was Tempo Music, a music rights investment company she founded and led as CEO and Board Director. At Tempo, she formed a strategic partnership with Warner Music Group, brought in Providence Equity Partners as a backer and delivered above-average returns for the investment class. It was a proof of concept. She knew how to buy, manage and monetize music intellectual property at scale. She also knew how to build a firm from a blank page.
When Tempo's chapter closed, she did not go back to a corporate seat. She went bigger.
Building Harbourview
In 2021, Clarke Soares founded HarbourView Equity Partners, headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. The firm launched with $1 billion in backing from Apollo Global Management, a statement of institutional confidence that was rare for any first-time fund manager and almost unprecedented for a Black woman in private equity.
The thesis was straightforward: music and entertainment intellectual property generates durable, recurring royalty income that is largely uncorrelated to equity markets. When a song gets placed in a film trailer, streamed 100 million times, or sampled in a hit record, the catalog owner collects. HarbourView set out to own as many of those catalogs as possible, managed through a rigorous data analytics and audience intelligence platform.
The execution has been relentless. Since 2021, HarbourView has acquired more than 70 music catalogs encompassing over 41,000 songs across master recordings and publishing rights. The portfolio includes works by Kelly Clarkson, Fleetwood Mac's Chris McVie, T-Pain, George Benson, Luis Fonsi, Wiz Khalifa, Nelly, Hit-Boy, Slipknot and dozens of others across genres, eras and markets. Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain" from HarbourView's catalog appeared in the official F1 movie trailer. Bad Bunny's viral Calvin Klein campaign sampled a HarbourView-owned Hector y Tito track.
The firm has secured two separate rounds of $500 million in debt financing from KKR, in 2024 and again in 2025, backed by private securitizations of its music portfolio. Total regulatory assets under management now stand at approximately $2.67 billion.
Beyond music
HarbourView's ambitions extend past catalogs. The firm has invested in MACRO, the film and television production company founded by Charles D. King. It led an $85 million investment in Animaj, the French AI-powered kids and family entertainment company. It led a $30 million round in Lion Forge Entertainment, the animated studio behind Oscar-winning short Hair Love. It backed Usher's 2024 concert film and is financing a slate of Hip Hop biopics in partnership with Will Smith's Westbrook Studios, Flavor Unit and Jesse Collins Entertainment, starting with a Queen Latifah biopic.
Clarke Soares sits on the board of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where she serves as Treasurer and Chair of the Finance Committee. She is a trustee of Carnegie Hall. She has been recognized by Billboard as a Top Power Player and Change Agent, named to Variety's Women of Impact list and received Billboard's Trailblazer Award at the Grammy Week Power 100 in 2023.
Her father said if he had the opportunities she has today, he would be Tishman Speyer. She heard him. She built something he would recognize.
