Warner Music Group

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Warner Music Group Corporation
Type Public (NYSE: WMG)
Founded 2003
Headquarters New York, NY, U.S. Flag of the United States
Key people Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Chairman & CEO
Industry Music & Entertainment
Revenue $3.502 Billion (USD; 2006)
Net income $169.0 Million (USD; 2006)
Employees 4,000 (2006)
Website WMG.com
Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Chairman & CEO
Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Chairman & CEO

Warner Music Group (WMG) is one of the four major record labels.

Warner Music Group also has a publishing arm, Warner/Chappell Music, which dates back to 1929, when Jack Warner, president of Warner Bros. Pictures Inc., founded Music Publishers Holding Company (“MPHC”) to acquire music copyrights as a means of providing inexpensive music for films. Amongst the historic compositions in which the publishing rights are controlled by WMG are the works of Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Its printed music operation, Warner Bros. Publications, was sold to Alfred Publishing on 2005-06-01.

Contents

WMG's roots in what became Time Warner date back to the founding of Warner Bros. Records as a division of the Warner Bros. movie studio in 1958, in reaction to one of its contracted actors, Tab Hunter scoring a hit for Dot Records, a division of Paramount Pictures. In 1963, Warner Bros. purchased Reprise Records, founded by Frank Sinatra 3 years earlier so that he could have more creative control over his recordings. Reprise was operated in conjunction with WBR.

After Warner Bros. was sold to Seven Arts Productions in 1967 (forming Warner Bros.-Seven Arts), it purchased Atlantic Records, now WMG's oldest label. For the next 2 years, Atlantic and its subsidiary label Atco Records were operated separately from WBR and Reprise.

In 1969, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts was sold to the Kinney National Company. Kinney (later to be known as Warner Communications) combined the operations of all of its record labels. The following year, Kinney bought Elektra Records and its sister label Nonesuch Records, and assembled the labels into a group known as Warner-Elektra-Atlantic, also called WEA for short, or Warner Music Group. The WEA name was also used as a label outside the U.S.

In the mid-1970s, WEA expanded by purchasing Asylum Records and Sire Records. The former was merged with Elektra to form Elektra-Asylum, though the separate names would still be used as well. The latter became a sublabel of WBR in the meanwhile.

WEA's labels also distributed a number of otherwise independent labels. For example, Warner Bros. distributed Straight Records, DiscReet Records, Bizarre Records, Bearsville Records, and Geffen Records (the latter was sold to MCA in 1990). Atlantic Records distributed Swan Song Records.

In 1987, it was announced that Warner Communications was to merge with Time Inc. to form Time Warner, a transaction which was completed in 1990.

Atlantic started 2 new subsidiary labels in the early 1990s - EastWest Records (which absorbed Atco Records) and Interscope Records. The former was later absorbed into Elektra, and the latter was also sold to MCA in 1995.

Time Warner sold the company in late 2003 to a group of investors led by Edgar Bronfman, Jr. for $2.6 billion. Time Warner was reportedly attempting to reduce its debt load. This spinoff was completed on February 27, 2004. In the 2004 transition to independent ownership, WMG hired record industry heavyweight Lyor Cohen from Universal Music Group (successor to MCA) to attempt to reduce cost and increase performance.

WMG's current logo is the former Warner Communications logo.

On May 5, 2006, WMG apparently rejected a buyout offer from EMI[1]. Then WMG offered to buy EMI and it also rejected the offer. The two companies are still in talks about a potential merger. The headquarters are located at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104. It is interesting to note that Time Warner may still have some ownership of Warner music because WMG does not license its trademarks from its former parent company.[verification needed]

Recently, WMG acquired Rykodisc (home of the Frank Zappa catalog), and Roadrunner Records.

Warner Music Group's labels include the following. It should be noted that some labels are actually divisions of other labels than in the order listed; this order reflects the current order of each label's administration.

WEA International Inc. has divisions worldwide such as Australia, Japan and all over Europe. These branches are usually called Warner Music followed by the name of the country. Some labels have more than one record company for example the UK has Warner Bros. UK and Atlantic UK.

  • Warner Music Group is the only one of the Big Four label groups that does not trace its roots back to the pre-1900 labels Columbia Records and Berliner Gramophone. Those U.S. labels' British licensees merged to become EMI in 1931. Then, in 2004, the successors to the original labels merged to form Sony BMG Music Entertainment. Universal Music Group's oldest label, Deutsche Grammophon, was founded in 1898 as the German licensee of Berliner Gramophone. In contrast, all of WMG's major labels were founded after World War II.
  • Warner Music Group is also the only one of the Big Four label groups that does not have a substantial link to European ownership. EMI is headquartered in London, Sony BMG is half owned by Bertelsmann (headquarted in Germany) and Universal Music Group is 100% owned by Vivendi SA (headquartered in Paris)

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