As the decade closed, WWE Music Group found themselves in a sticky situation – having lost their long-standing music director Jim Johnston in December 2017, they stuck their guns alongside young producers CFO$ which started collaborating with the label as early as 2012, on the verge of yet another partnership ending.

It became apparent that John Alicastro and Mike Lauri had parted ways in May 2019, as the Music Group stopped releasing singles of new CFO$ themes, the last one being Mia Yim’s “Number One”. Despite this, the record label continued to release Uncaged albums until the end of the year, and released just one more single that featured a band that had taken part of NXT LOUD sub-label, managed by Neil Lawi and Paul “Triple H” Levesque, Code Orange, making a heavier theme for “The Fiend” Bray Wyatt.

WWE Music Group found themselves in the midst of a social media “blackout” – only going online to advertise an Uncaged release, or to share playlists under new partnerships with Pandora Radio and Apple Music – all while WWE superstars were debuting more and more new songs on television, of which no information could be found on who made them, where to purchase or stream them.

After months of research, Arenataping can reveal the identity of the team behind the recent themes of Bayley, Buddy Murphy, Elias, Io Shirai, The O.C., etc.

While searching for WWE Music Group’s publishing company – Stephanie Music Publishing Inc. – on BMI’s Repertoire we could find not only the track names of those recent songs, but also the names of the songwriters involved. Two names are majorly found in all of the latest tracks – Douglas J Davis and Ali Dee Theodore.

Doug Davis is an American music industry executive, entertainment lawyer and Grammy Award winning record producer. He and Ali Dee, a peer music producer, joined forces to create a production team that has already had clients like EA, Disney, Viacom, Netflix, etc. – DJDTP.

Alongside them are James Petrie and Jodie Shihadeh, business partners of Doug at DJDTP and The Davis Firm, PLLC. While not officially named members of the production firm, Anthony Mirabella III (known artistically as BeIIIa), Susan Melissa Paroff, and Nikki Ann Sorrentino (known artistically as Nikki Era) are also frequently credited as writers.

In our research, we found 24 tracks linked to DJDTP and Stephanie Music Publishing. The first track listed is “Gotta Get That”, Money in the Bank 2019’s theme song, which got featured on the WWE 2K20 video game, marking the start of the partnership as summer approached. Incidentally, Code Orange’s “Let Me In” is credited to DJDTP’s team – technically proving they already released their first single as WWE collaborators.

Chris Classic, who formerly had collaborated with Jim Johnston to create Rey Mysterio’s infamous “619” theme, is also found to be related to DJDTP, specifically to Ali Dee and Mirabella. Classic’s singles “Work” and “Here We Go” were both used as official theme songs for WrestleMania 35 and Hell in a Cell 2019, respectively, and, while uncredited, he further provided vocals for WrestleMania 35’s introduction song “Never Die” and Money in the Bank 2019’s “Gotta Get That”, featuring Nikki Era.

The lack of single releases, nonetheless, can be attributed to potential legal issues between WWE Music Group and Arcade Songs, employers of the CFO$ duo, who pointed out to a prolonged period for their productions to be heard on television when WWE announced a broadcasting deal with USA Network for the NXT brand.

Arenataping tried to reach press contacts at WWE Music Group, who were unavailable to comment.

Founder of the Davis Firm, Doug Davis, and his music team, DJDTP were also unavailable for comment at the time of publication.

Special thanks to Xylot Themes for helping with the research.