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Sam Holdsworth, Former Billboard Publisher and Co-Owner, Dead at 72

Sam Holdsworth is dead. The former Billboard publisher and owner was 72.

“He was the brains and taste and I was the mouth and energy…Our early days as a magazine for school music programs were so rocky, until Sam proposed a left sharp turn after our first year to jazz and rock,” Baird wrote in a piece published Monday (June 10) in The Gloucester (Maine) Times. Readers came to us, record company publicists came to us, Paul McCartney came to us, Springsteen, Michael Jackson, George Harrison, Bono, Clapton and Steely Dan came to us to be interviewed. Hobbs had found the perfect partner to help realize his goal of acquiring and expanding BPI to include not only music properties but also those devoted to film and theater as well as art and design.

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