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Business News Labels & Publishers
BMG launches in Australia
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 17 March 2016
You know how you were trying to impress your mum the other day by telling her that BMG was a major company in the Australian music industry?
Well, first, I don’t know why you were bothering, because the only music company your mum’s heard of is the Britannia Music Club, so she just assumed she’d misheard ‘C’ as ‘G’ and you were talking about that. Secondly, and all the more embarrassing for you, is the fact that BMG didn’t even exist in Australia when you were saying all that. It does now though, so at least your pointless babbling can have a small amount of accuracy in retrospect.
Yeah mate, BMG’s launched in Australia. That’s the news. Or maybe the news is that in the modern music industry, big music rights companies operate in China for eighteen months before they get around to launching down under. Either way, BMG Australia is now a thing.
“Australia has long been one of the greatest music producing nations in the world”, screamed BMG CEO Hartwig Masuch. “Australian songwriters and artists are an important element of the BMG catalogue. It is therefore a logical step for us to launch our own operation in Sydney, giving Australian songwriters and artists a genuine alternative to the established companies”.
As for why anyone in Australia might want to work with BMG, he added: “We are proud to be the only music company in history to set out its stall from day one to offer transparency and service to the people who make the music. A commitment to fairness is in our DNA. We believe these values are as important to Australian music-makers as they are to our clients in the rest of the world”.
The new office will be overseen by Heath Johns, who joins from Universal Music Publishing, where he was A&R Director. Said Johns: “What BMG has achieved in just seven years is extraordinary. They have created a new kind of business designed to cater for what songwriters and artists want today. Having met the BMG teams in LA, London and Berlin and having seen the company’s values in action, I am convinced BMG will prove very appealing to Australia’s creative community”.
Let’s hope so, or your mum is going to be very disappointed in you when she finds out the truth.
