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BMG now bidding for the whole of Warner
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 22 March 2011
BMG is back in the bidding for the Warner Music Group and this time is going for the whole company, US media reports claimed last night.
BMG is one of over ten parties who recently put in bids to buy some or all of the Warner music company. It is believed the company originally bid only for Warner’s publishing division Warner/Chappell, and that Warner’s current owners said the offer price was too low but that they would accept a new bid. And, according to CNBC, that new bid sees KKR-backed BMG bid for the whole of Warner, including its record labels.
BMG, of course, is officially a music rights business interested in the exploitation of any music copyrights, whether they be in sound recordings (ie the rights traditionally owned by record companies) or songs (ie the rights traditionally owned by music publishers).
That said, the majority of BMG’s acquisitions to date have focused on the music publishing sector, though their top man, Hartwig Masuch, did tell Music Week last year he was more interested in EMI’s record labels than its publishing catalogues.
All that said, the consensus is that if BMG did secure the whole of Warner Music it’d look to offload most of the record labels, most likely to either Sony or Universal. So much so there have been rumours of BMG, Sony and Universal making a joint bid for Warner, though those rumours don’t seem to have much substance.
A bid to buy Warner Music outright with the intent of breaking it up might not be attractive to current Warner CEO and notable shareholder Edgar Bronfman Jr, who is believed to prefer the option of selling Warner/Chappell to help fund an acquisition of the EMI record labels, which are also up for sale. Therefore he seems unlikely to support the BMG bid, unless, perhaps, there was some kind of influential role on offer for him at the increasingly acquisitive music rights company.
