“Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s Warner Music Group, once derided as an awkward investment in a troubled industry, is starting to gather a little steam,” Sandy Brown reports for TheStreet.com. “Bronfman’s $2.6 billion buy of the Time Warner music division last year, along with a group of private-equity hard chargers, was written off as little more than a vanity play for a self-professed music fanatic cum media mogul. After all, the music industry has been hit by rampant piracy and declining retail sales, trends the industry has been unable to contain. But the tables may be turning. Described as a noncore asset at Time Warner, Warner Music now looks like a play on a management group that saw the time was right to get into an industry in transition.”
“Part of the reason for the uptick may be what Bronfman has said recently regarding file-sharing, industry pricing and pay-for-content as it is distributed on newer platforms,” Brown reports. “‘We are really the arms suppliers to a significant series of wars going on,’ Bronfman said at a recent conference. He noted what he called the device wars, ‘as Sony, Samsung and others come after Apple’s dominance in the device space,’ as well as content distribution wars among telcos, cable, broadcast and others. Plus, Bronfman said, there’s ‘opportunity for penetration on existing platforms like mobile, where, despite drastic changes we’ve seen in digital, we have yet to sell a single song.'”
Brown reports, “Bronfman would like to change the balance of what the music labels get paid for and what they give away. He says that 20 years ago the industry gave music to MTV and made that business successful, and that has more recently been the case where iPods are concerned. ‘We’re selling our songs through iPods, but we don’t have a share of iPods’ revenue,’ he said. ‘We have to keep thinking about how to monetize our content for our shareholders where we’ve been creating value for so many other streams.'”
“Though Bronfman and his group have seemingly put Warner Music on the right track, some investors still think Time Warner made the right choice in bidding adieu to the music business,” Brown reports. “The challenge for Bronfman is to prove those problems aren’t too big to overcome.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Wethinks Middlebronfman has popped his cork. Now the greedy @#$%&! wants a share of the hardware revenue, too? Did the record labels get a cut of turntable sales for umpteen years? Did Sony pay Warner Music a percentage of each and every cassette Walkman they sold? For the love of Jobs!
From Middlebronfman’s iPod voice recorder: “Note to self: don’t forget to call the iPod case and accessory makers, we deserve a cut from them, too. And the headphone and speaker makers. Oh, and those guys that make the chips inside iPods, too. And copper smelters! And the plastics makers!! And the LCD screen makers!!! And, and, and… more later. Money, money, money! Ah-hahahahaha!!! (singing) money, money, money, money!“
We hope that someday Steve Jobs is the one who eliminates the middlebronfman and allows the artists to go directly to their fans via iTunes; no more outdated ideas like making an album a year (you write a song, record it and release it via iTunes whenever the creative urge hits) and no more greedy, waste-of-space middlebronfman types always getting in the way with their stupid money-hungry ideas and disproportionately outsized takes.
[Note: MacDailyNews coined the term “Middlebronfman,” a combination of “middleman” and “Bronfman,” in an article on Monday, October 03, 2005 with the sentence, “Eliminate the middlebronfman.” Full article here.]
Related articles:
Apple’s iTunes Music Store dominates as digital music sales more than triple – October 03, 2005
Dvorak: record companies’ biggest concern about Apple’s iTunes is clear and accountable bookkeeping – September 29, 2005
In 99-cent fight with ‘Looney iTunes’ labels, Apple CEO Jobs will get whatever Jobs wants – September 29, 2005
Warner music exec discusses decapitation strategy for Apple iTunes Music Store – September 28, 2005
Warner CEO Bronfman: Apple iTunes Music Store’s 99-cent-per-song model unfair – September 23, 2005
Analyst: Apple has upper hand in iTunes Music Store licensing negotiations with music labels – September 23, 2005
Steve Jobs plays high-stakes poker with greedy record labels – September 22, 2005
Record labels accuse Apple CEO Jobs of ‘double standard’ as they seek to force iTunes price increase – September 21, 2005
Apple CEO Steve Jobs to repel ‘greedy’ record companies’ demands for higher iTunes prices – September 21, 2005
Apple CEO Steve Jobs vows to stand firm in face of ‘greedy’ record companies – September 20, 2005
NYT’s Pogue to record companies: it’d be idiotic to mess with Apple iTunes Music Store prices – August 31, 2005
Apple CEO Steve Jobs prepares for pivotal fight on digital music prices – August 28, 2005
BusinessWeek: Apple unlikely to launch music subscription service – August 15, 2005
Record labels to push Apple for higher iTunes Music Store prices in 2006? – August 05, 2005
Study shows Apple iTunes Music Store pay-per-download model preferred over subscription service – April 11, 2005
Record labels look to raise iTunes wholesale prices, music industry fears Apple’s market domination – March 05, 2005
Report: Apple CEO Steve Jobs ‘angered’ as music labels try to raise prices for downloads – February 28, 2005
Report: Music labels delay Euro iTunes Music Store fearing Apple domination – May 05, 2004
Greedy Big Five music labels looking to jack up iTunes songs to $2.49 each? – April 22, 2004
wtfreak!
This guy needs a lobotomy.
A share of a product they dont have any part in producing? Yeah , right.
Besides, you dont have to own and iPod in order to buy their music.
oh of course! it was WARNER that made the ipod…it all makes sence now!
*smacks head* i should have known!
magic word: cost, as in: it costs Apple to make iPods, this is why THEY make profit from them.
Z
Edgar Dorkman can get stuffed!
Does Adobe get a percentage of every PC that gets sold?
Does Exxon get a share of every BMW?
Maybe GE should get a share of every lampshade.
theyre not going to be needed in the future. where does he get off thinking that hes important, its about the music, and the music comes from the artists. warner and the rest are just the middlemen, gees.
apple is already a distributer. and the fairsest most efficient of them all. just wait until the music labels are cut out of the picture, as far as i can see the music labels are finished. its just a matter of time now. when apple make their own label and give more of the profits back to the artists then just sit back and watch the artists flee in droves. only remains to be seen how long it will take.
What a fool. As if this guy is gonna get anything from Apple. Steve Jobs will laugh his ass out of the office.
it all makes sence now!
Yes it all makes cents, scents, sense now.
Although I find MDN too antagonistic… this time… his wrath at Brofman is 1000% justified…
What a jerk this Brofman is and what kind of mentality is it? Seems like he is trying to be the righteousness fighter for the industry and the consumers… GO HOME! BEAT IT!
continuing post by MCCFR:
Do music labels get a share from CD players sold?
Do movie studios get a share from DVD players sold?
OMG! This kind of greed is crazy. They get money for the music (too much compared to the artists IMHO). If they are really concerned about increasing revenue, they need to rethink their business strategy, not go after the things that play the music.
Note to Brofman: Easy way to participate in iPod revenues, buy Apple Stock!
Disney sells videos for Home TV. Do they get a percentage of TV sales or DVD sales or VCR sales?
Boronfman is bonkers!
End result of all this: iTunes Music label, or buyout of Beatles’ Apple and compete head to head with them by not being greedy
I can´t remember when there was any news about Apple computers.
We sell music but we don’t get a share of what you paid for your cd player, turntable, cassette deck. Oh the humanity. This sounds like RealPlayer all over again.
Why doesn´t apple buy the music companies????
Edgar is a bit upset – he blew the Seagrams family fortune by selling off the booze for Universal Studios then he screwed that up and got into the music business and can´t do that either.
Me-thinks Middlebronfman has gone cuckoo!
I think he needs a flood of emails.
PURE (&(^%^(*^%$%$&* GREED!!!!
Wasnt their a study recently which found that only 60 or so songs on each iPod are legitimate/legal Dl’s, the rest being p2p warez?
Okay, here you are, some bigshot musician whose band’s contract is up for renewal. It’s time to shop around. Do you (a) go to Warner, so that some breathtakingly arrogant buffoon can gamble your future in a heads-Warner-wins-tails-you-both-lose gambit, or (b) sign with somebody else?
Tough choice. Guess I’d go with Sony. Or Virgin. Or Apple.
Methinks that they are looking at the model developed for the Music CD-R where the only difference from a regular CD-R was that part of the purchase price went to a general fund to distribute royalties. They made the assumption that it would be used to re-record commercial music. I doubt that anyone that really deserved the royalties actually received them.
Does that mean that they should have been collecting revenue for every gramophone and record player ever manufactured?
The platform war is nothing new in when it comes to devices that play music…. look at the shift from 78’s to 45’s and 33 1/3’s and the different companies… Columbia/CBS, RCA and others who offered competing “platforms.”
What is new is the pushing of greed way beyond the reasonable limits of the past.
Simple question…..
What value does a music company add ?
Now with modern technology and consumers on the internet, they are no longer needed for production, promotion or distribution.
The music companies act like they create this content….they don’t. They buy it from artists for pennies on the dollar and then act as a broker to the buying public.
Their business model is to screw the artists and the consumers to the max. Apple has to figure out a way to get more money to the artists and squeeze out the record companies.