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.

Comments

I'm done with sony like 2 decades ago

[TigerPlish]

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?

Re:I'm done with sony like 2 decades ago

[CastrTroy]

The problem is that great hardware is now a commodity. You used to have to pay a lot of money to get high quality equipment. It required a lot of R&D to create a good product so it required high markups. However, with the decades of innovation, we are now able to get very good products for a very small amount of money. There are still companies selling high end equipment, but the majority of people just generally can't tell the difference or just don't care about the difference.

The PlayStation points right to this problem. It's a commodity piece of hardware built off generic parts.You can pick one up right now for $400. Sure you could probably get a better experience from a PC, but you'll be hard pressed to even build a PC for that amount of money. Especially one that can play games at the level of the PS4.

"Good Enough" products are taking over the market. I got a $300 phone, almost a year back, and it does everything I need a phone to do. Why would I pay $1000 for a phone when the $300 phone isn't really all that different in day-to-day experience?

Re:Compacting

[youngone]

Getting rid of competition is the end goal for capitalism.
If the capitalists can get ownership of the regulators, as they have in many industries in the US they have a great leg up towards that goal.

So the big three become the big two

[johnsie]

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.