Steve Oliver is the Founder and CEO of musicMagpie, one of the great Northern entrepreneurial success stories. After the collapse of Music Zone, the retailer he was managing director of, a failure that cost him half the value of his family home. Steve invested the other half into a new venture, by starting trading people’s old CDs and DVDs initially from his garage in Stockport in 2007. What began as a "lazy man's eBay" for trading in CDs, DVDs and games pivoted towards phones and consumer tech, growing today into the number one buyer and seller of refurbished phones in the UK and, remarkably, the biggest seller in the history of both eBay and Amazon globally. musicMagpie floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 at a value of £208 million, and was subsequently acquired by AO in late 2024. Across its history the business has generated a cumulative £2 billion of gross income. A pioneer of the circular economy and champion of sustainability, Steve also chairs the Stockport Economic Alliance, and announced in July that he'll step down at the end of September in his words, "to chase more thrills."

I hope you enjoy it…

You can find Sam on socials at @SamJonesMCR

Produced by Sally Rutter

Adverts

Chatting with Cherubs: https://www.instagram.com/chattingwithcherubs/

Dogs4Rescue: https://dogs4rescue.co.uk/