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Sony In $2.3 Billion Deal For EMI, Becomes World's Biggest Music Publisher
Sony said on Tuesday it would pay about $2.3 billion to gain control of EMI, becoming the world's largest music publisher in an industry that has found new life on the back of streaming services. Reuters reports: The acquisition is the biggest strategic move yet by new CEO Kenichiro Yoshida and gives Sony a catalogue of more than 2 million songs from artists such as Kanye West, Sam Smith and Sia. The deal is part of Yoshida's mission to make revenue streams more stable with rights to entertainment content -- a strategy that follows a major revamp by his predecessor which shifted Sony's focus away from low-margin consumer electronics.
The spread of the internet led to a shrinking of the music market from around 1999 to 2014, Yoshida said, but added that has turned around with the growth of fixed-price music streaming services. The deal values EMI Music Publishing at $4.75 billion including debt, more than double the $2.2 billion value given in 2011 when a consortium led by Sony won bidding rights for the company. EMI currently commands 15 percent of the music publishing industry which combined with its Sony ATV business would make the Japanese giant the industry leader with market share of 26 percent, a company spokesman said.
The spread of the internet led to a shrinking of the music market from around 1999 to 2014, Yoshida said, but added that has turned around with the growth of fixed-price music streaming services. The deal values EMI Music Publishing at $4.75 billion including debt, more than double the $2.2 billion value given in 2011 when a consortium led by Sony won bidding rights for the company. EMI currently commands 15 percent of the music publishing industry which combined with its Sony ATV business would make the Japanese giant the industry leader with market share of 26 percent, a company spokesman said.
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They made their name making amazing hardware... I saved for months until I got the Walkman that was barely bigger than the cassette itself.. I had Trinitron monitor, Trinitron TV..Sony VCR. Their stuff was very capable of triggering the drools and the gimmie-gimmies. 70's and 80's.. yeah. Droolworthy kit. ...and then, about 20 years ago, they abandoned electronics. Their stuff became cheap, derivative. No longer bleeding edge.
I read Morita's book on Sony. I'm left wondering "So, where did Sony go?" I don't see that Sony anywhere anymore. The scrappy little company built on rice cookers (their first product, but not branded Sony) and tape recorders (their first branded product) is no more, it's just a shell. I guess PlayStation is the last shred left. They even fucked the cinema owners with SDDS and left them hanging.
Having to buy EMI to pad their music fluff doesn't speak well for Sony's future. Don't you have to *make* stuff to *sell* stuff? Or have I missed a gigantic paradigm shift?
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
it's too much trouble to find nowadays. I miss the heyday of eMusic when I got 70 songs for $20/mo. I could pull 7 or 8 albums, most of which were crap but a few were great. Then they decided to go all in on competing with Apple (they're big in Europe) and raised prices to $0.99 cents a song. That makes music sampling and finding new bands a lot harder. I could drive down to my local record store.... 40 miles away. Haven't had much luck on youtube either. It doesn't help that I'm old and the kind of music I like is dead and gone.
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In my opinion, it's time to make the n-word taboo for everyone of every color. Right now some "artists" are being silly and asking their non-POC fans to sing along on stage and then act offended when the non-POC sings the n-word that's in their song. It's a cultural change in progress and some people are getting caught in the cross-fire. I don't get why that word is enduring to African-Americans/etc, it should be offensive for anyone to say it, but it is time to stop adding it to new works, just like leaving your kids in a hot car alone isn't ok any more. [on topic]The easy way to make the n-word in popular songs go away like the Rebel flag is to shame any large company that makes any money from calling people the n-word in the songs. Some of the large music companies may insist on keeping the n-word in new music, but I hope that the public that buys music is a little more respectful of everyone.
Disney buying Fox, Sony buying EMI, T-Mobile merging with Sprint. Who needs competition?
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
What is Sony ATV? All Terrain Vehicles?
So now EMI will become exponentially worse than they already are? It's a definite probability so let's cue up the Sex Pistols.
Universal, Sony and Warner pretty much control music sales around the world. Some interesting statistics about record sales can be found here: https://www.statista.com/stati... Sometimes it's hard to tell if another label is owned by one of those groups.
Because a Negro mind is a terrible waste.
Electro Magnetic Interference sounds like music compared to nowadays music.
I remember when Sony bought CBS Records. On DRM, I mentioned before that "Thinking about it, part of the reasons music labels got big is for economy of scale when mass producing CDs for example. Of course, such economy of scale was not needed anymore with the move to digital distribution. This didn't work well with the current debt-based economy where shareholders depends on stocks always going up for things like retirements and companies treat people as "consumers" to be extracted from. I assume that Hollywood has similar problems, right?"