Sony BMG’s new boss
p2pnet.net News:- BMG’s Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, chairman of the new Big Music cartel member Sony BMG, will “lose his executive hat” in a “bitter-sweet victory”.
That’s how Reuters puts Schmidt-Holtz’s elevation in the company, which turns the Big Five record labels into the Big Four.
The “tall, moustachioed Bertelsmann veteran will one more time need to employ all the charm and toughness that helped him turn around BMG, the smallest of the five music majors, as the head of a committee that will oversee the bringing together of the two businesses in the coming months”.
His main task will be to “push through as much as $350 million in annual savings to offset the 20 percent drop in sales that the music industry has suffered in the last three years,” says Reuters, going on that although there’ll be “similar overhead functions to slash,” there’s also the risk in the “diva-laden music industry of undermining the all-important creative end of the business”.
Ah yes. That.
Sony BMG becomes the world’s second largest music group with Universal Music as # 1 and “Sony Music’s planned merger with the music arm of Germany’s Bertelsmann is aimed at boosting up the electronics and entertainment conglomerate’s music download business,” eubusiness.com here.
And, “With a wider range of music titles available under the Sony brand, I think Sony may be hoping to improve sales of its version of the iPod,” Osamu Hirose, an analyst at Tokai Tokyo Research Center, is quoted as saying.
The US Federal Trade Commission still has to approve the deal but even if it does, there are a lot of angry people who are hell bent on continuing to oppose it.
European performing artists, independent music companies and entertainment retailers recently issued a joint statement saying the merger is “fundamentally flawed” and that they’d resort to legal action unless the European Commission stepped in.
But as The Motley Fool says here, “Sure, there were some competitive concerns, but when you really think about it this is a lot like trying to police prudence in an elephants’ graveyard.
“If the two graying pachyderms want to hook up, just let it be their dying wish and learn to look the other way.”
Andrew Lack, Sony Music Entertainment’s chairman and ceo, is slated to run the company from its New York HQ.
=============================
Updated at 9:11 am Pacific)
