Browsing all posts in record labels.

Sony X BMG

The joint venture between Sony and Bertelsmann (BMG) is no more. Sony of Japan purchased BMG’s 50% stake for US$900 million. The new company will be called Sony Music Entertainment Inc. Within the JV, Sony just technically owned 60% of USA music album sales while BMG owned the other 40%. With Sony buying out BMG’s [...]

EMI Going Retro

EMI is stepping up their vinyl album releases. For those of you born in the digital age, people used to listen to music on big discs like the one to your right. So EMI is going to release vinyl albums by Coldplay, Radiohead, and the Steve Miller Band. Last year, vinyl sales increased 80% to [...]

Inside EMI

EMI appears set to have quite the week. Tomorrow (6/17), EMI will release the new Coldplay album, Viva la Vida. This is a pretty much guaranteed success story. The album was released in the UK last week and has already sold over 300,000 copies. And Coldplay is a band where people want to listen to [...]

Big Label Investment in Start-ups

This is in continuation of a blog from just a few days where I talked about the big labels being too big to really pursue the opportunities and new ideas in the changing marketplace. Instead, many start-ups are being purchased by the big labels as the strategy to develop new business models. Another example comes [...]

Major Labels & Startups

It’s easy to point fingers at the record industry and chide them for plain stupidity. Yeah, they completely missed the boat, but on the other hand, their whole business model was set on artist development and the sale of cd’s. That means all of the contracts, the corporate structure, and the company culture all pointed [...]