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.

EMI suck :)

[james1nt]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

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?

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[currently_awake]

Companies follow a pattern: 1-Do great stuff and make money. 2-try to make more money without more effort. 3-coast on your brand name, sucking all the life out of the corporation before you leave with your golden parachute.

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[vlad30]

4 Extend copyright so nobody else can make new stuff and everyone is stuck buying your old crap thats why they think buying EMI will work for them the back catalog

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[arglebargle_xiv]

Since music producers are being absolutely killed by home taping, you wonder why Sony would pay 2 billion dollars to take one one?

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[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

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[willaien]

I was done with Sony after I got burned twice on their consumer hardware. Once with Xperia Play, again on the PS3. With the play, they promised an upgrade to Android 4.0 (yes, this has been a while back), which never materialized. Got burned with the PS3 over OtherOS.

I gave up on music

[rsilvergun]

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

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[mentil]

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 webs

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[rtb61]

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?!?

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[CastrTroy]

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 p

Compacting

[mentil]

Disney buying Fox, Sony buying EMI, T-Mobile merging with Sprint. Who needs competition?

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[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.

ATV?

[spitzak]

What is Sony ATV? All Terrain Vehicles?

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[Dusthead Jr.]

Associated Television, a British music publishing company. It was bought by Michael Jackson in 1985 and sold to CBS records which was bought by Sony.

Worse?

[beep54]

So now EMI will become exponentially worse than they already are? It's a definite probability so let's cue up the Sex Pistols.

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... [statista.com] Sometimes it's hard to tell if another label is owned by one of those groups.

Good thing audio DRM is dead

[yuhong]

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 Holly