For Sale by Owner: Warner Music
p2pnet view Music:- The Big 4 music labels as they once were are dead. You can tell from the smell.
But it’s all about the money, not the music. So odours notwithstanding, they’ll be patched together into corporate Frankensteins so ‘product’ can still be pushed.
The corpse of EMI is currently being picked through by bankers, and now it looks as though Warner, run into the ground by Canada’s Edgar Bronfman jr, may be going the same way, with Goldman Sachs, bailed out by American taxpayers during the George W. Bush economic ‘crisis’ so it could use the money to award its top executives million-dollar bonuses for their failures, front and centre.
Warner has hired the company to “seek out potential buyers”, a process that’ll “play out while Warner continues to explore buying the beleaguered British music giant EMI”, says the New York Times.
Get someone to buy you while you’re trying to buy someone else?
Goldman Sucks, already up to its neck in deal where it’s succeeded in grossly inflating the value of Fa$ebook to an incredible $50 billion dollars, plus, arrived after “several suitors, including the buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, approached Warner Music’s management in recent months about buying the company”, the story has the usual unnamed source saying.
But Bronfman and crew “decided to begin a formal sale process by hiring Goldman, which has recently begun making pitches to financial investors and media companies about buying Warner”, it says, gong on >>>
One possible outcome of the auction is for Warner to sell not the entire company but only Warner/Chappell, its prized publishing arm, said a person with direct knowledge of the process.
Meanwhile, a separate set of bankers within Goldman has been working on a potential acquisition of EMI by Warner. Goldman has reached out to Citigroup, which owns a large amount of EMI’s debt and could soon control the company if it fails to meet its payments, according to executives involved in the process, who would speak of the confidential negotiations only anonymously.
Adds the story:
“According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry … sales of music declined nearly 23 percent between 2005 and 2009. Over that time, Warner’s revenue declined much less — around 9 percent.
“With the rise of the file-sharing Web site Napster in the late 1990s, the music industry was the first slice of the media business to see its economics disrupted by the digital age, and by the time Mr. Bronfman and his group bought Warner, that trend was clear. The decline of newspapers followed the diminishment of the music industry, and more recently the economics of television and film have also come under pressure from the Internet.
“But unlike, say, newspapers and magazines, the music industry has embraced a durable model to get paid for selling music online through services such as Apple’s iTunes Store — even if revenue has declined and piracy remains rampant.”
A “durable model”? Dream on.
$50 billion dollars – Psssst. Wanna buy shares in Facebook?, January 18, 2011
New York Times – Warner Music Plan: Buy or Be Bought, January 18, 2011
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
World War III will be a global information war with no division between civilian & military participation ~ Marshall McLuhan
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. Subscribe to p2pnet.net | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/feed
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
January 21st, 2011 at 10:11 am
Let’s get the public to each chip in a few dollars. Imagine that, Warner music owned by a mass public audience! The RIAA would be shitting in their pants!
So very tempting! Even in tough economic times I’m certain we could find the masses able to donate even $5 each. Get enough around the world, promise them the truth – we’ll take over the industry and give it back to the artists and public, so real art can come out and use the Internet as it was intended, a cheap way of distribution!
January 21st, 2011 at 12:17 pm
@Robert:
Nah. Let ‘em die.
Neither the artists or the buying public need this black-hole-of-money business model to exist anymore.
We can all “give back” to those artists that “get it” and start dealing with us more directly. As for the ones that have been snorting the MAFIAA coke and jumping on the MAFIAA podium to give us a piece of their brainwashed minds, they can, and should, go get stuffed!
January 21st, 2011 at 12:33 pm
I just saw this on Cyberpresse.ca:
It’s from the Associated Press in Paris, and here’s a rough translation:
Suspended prison sentence and 6.8 millions fine for Edgar Bronfman Jr.
Two former executives of Vivendi, including one influential member of the Bronfman family, were sentenced by a court on Friday in France.
First, the former CEO, Jean-Marie Messier, was sentenced to three years suspended sentence by the Paris court for abuse of corporate assets and for dissemination of false and misleading.
As the former executive vice president of Vivendi, Edgar Bronfman Jr., he was sentenced to 15 months suspended sentence and a fine equivalent to more than 6.8 million CDN for dissemination of false or misleading prospects or condition of an issuer from 2000 to 2002, and price manipulation in 2001.
Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi left the presidency in 2002, several months after the publication of huge financial losses. The management of the firm was then subjected to a flood of complaints and investigations for a variety of equity and capital offenses.
In the final trial in the United States last year, Mr. Messier has however escaped condemnation.
For their part, the former CEO of VU (Vivendi Universal) Eric Licoys and former Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer William Hannezo were sentenced Friday in Paris, to sentences of six and fifteen months in prison suspended. Three other defendants were freed.
Edgar Bronfman Jr., who is 55 years old, is the grand-son of Samuel Bronfman, the elder of the famous family, who spent most of his life in Montreal where he died in 1971.
January 21st, 2011 at 1:30 pm
@Captain:
Like the prison sentences, I’m sure the fines will end up being suspended as well.
January 21st, 2011 at 2:19 pm
@ Captain555:
Funny, that. Or not funny. At the beginning of the month I did a post wondering what the hell had happened in this case – http://www.p2pnet.net/story/47380
Here’s an update – http://www.p2pnet.net/story/47895
Cheers!
January 24th, 2011 at 8:22 am
“sales of music declined nearly 23 percent between 2005 and 2009…”
I took a brief detour around youtube just now to check out the top 100 songs of the 2000’s first decade. I have to say, when you put it all together back to back that way it becomes really obvious how awful the “music” has become. I was thinking it might just be me getting older or something, but when you see it all compacted together in all its auto-tuned manufactured soulless-ness it can’t possibly be ignored that more than 90% of it is absolute garbage. Crap. Audio Pollution. The internet wasn’t really to blame at all. The music industry machine is what created the sewage we are up to our ears in and it’s obvious the lack of talented musicians even involved. Makes me think I really should have taken the opportunity to break into the field in the last 10 years – there certainly wouldn’t have been any competition. Seriously – check out the VH-1 list if you can afford the blood loss through your ears and realize that no one would even bother to pirate that shite… I’ll be amazed if someone can find some actual musicianship in the songs and there isn’t one album from the last five years I would buy at all…