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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.
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.
The major music labels arguably all do the same thing anyhow (the RIAA doesn't help with this), how many bands can you tell what label they're with? It's not like DC vs. Marvel, or Pixar vs. Dreamworks, where it's pretty clear which is which.
Ontopic: Finding new music is easier than ever, now. No more listening to the radio station you like and praying you hear something that's not in heavy rotation, or that something new rotates in. Now there are countless online streams, satellite radio channels, and websites dedicated to finding/hearing new music (e.g. Pandora). Youtube has plenty of old/rare music as well; want a video of Rodney Dangerfield rapping, or a lost performance of a jazz great? They've got it. Many online music stores let you play back parts of songs that are for sale, to tell if you like them (or if it's that song you're trying to find). And there are other sites dedicated to free (legal) streams and downloads, where I tend to find the best stuff (e.g. Bandcamp, Soundcloud). On the internet, almost nothing is TOO obscure to find.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
That's not the current problem, the current problem is the review of copyright durations due to the excess flow from the internet, everything will end up locked up and choked, simply too much content and you can not differentiate under law, so the copyright crunch is inevitable, no need to promote anything, already too much, copyright will be shrunk and how low can it go is now the question. Copyright the new global conflict?!?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
Why would you want to spend $20 a month for 7 or 8 albums when you could spend $10 a month an get access to basically all the albums. I was on eMusic back when there was no subscription services, but I cancelled after a while because I realized that was usually just downloading random stuff to make sure I got my money's worth.
I know a lot of people are against subscription services, but personally I think they are great, but only because they got the price right. For less than the cost of a single album per month, I have access to a huge catalog of music that includes most of the stuff I would have bought anyway. Sure I don't "own" the music, but it also offers a lot of convenience. I can access that entire music library without having to go through any trouble with ripping my CD collection, having a server, or having a massive amount of storage on every device that I may want to listen to music on.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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?"