Goldman, GTCR bid for BMG Music Publishing: sources
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Goldman Sachs' private equity arm   and Chicago-based private equity firm GTCR submitted separate  bids for BMG Music Publishing, people familiar with the sale  said on Monday.
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Recording-industry giants EMI and Sony BMG announced an umbrella agreement Monday to address digital rights management (DRM) issues for music on mobile phones, PCs and digital cable systems.
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Music industry giants have agreed on a deal that aims to boost developement of new music distribution methods in the US and Canada.
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U.S. media conglomerate Viacom has  teamed up with private equity group Apollo to submit an offer  for BMG Music Publishing in a bid battle that could top 1.5  billion euros ($1.92 billion), sources close to the matter  said.
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Universal Music Group, the world's  largest record company, and advertising conglomerate WPP are  expected to unveil a 50-50 joint venture on Tuesday to link top  brands with famous artists, The Times newspaper said.
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(InfoWorld) - More than two years after a security researcher first called attention to Sony BMG's use of a stealth program to enforce digital rights management on its music CDs, the company reached a deal with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over the incident, the FTC announced on Tuesday. In a deal that was approved by a 5-0 vote by the FTC, Sony agreed to clearly disclose limitations on consumers' use of its music CDs and promised not to collect information for marketing or install software without consumers consent, the FTC said. The company also agreed to reimburse consumers up to $150 for computers damaged by the program, the FTC said. The settlement marks an end to a long and embarrassing incident for the company, which began when Mark Russinovich, an expert on Windows security of WinTernals Software, now part of Microsoft, published the results of his investigation into a rootkit that had infiltrated his Windows machine. Russinovich's research uncovered a stealth program, dubbed "XCP," distributed on CDs from Sony BMG that silently installed and concealed itself on the machines of customers who played the CD. The revelation and Sony's awkward response to it -- first denying that there was any problem with the XCP program, then making halting efforts to release programs to remove XCP -- set of a chorus of criticism on blogs and in the mainstream press. Subsequent investigation revealed that the XCP program was poorly conceived, hastily written and could be used by hackers to conceal their own malicious programs on systems that had the XCP program installed. Eventually, Sony posted a software removal program for the XCP and conducted a widescale recall of XCP enabled CDs. But the incident was a watershed, prompting discussions of the competing interests of copy protection by corporations and consumers' right to privacy. In the consent agreement announced today, the FTC said that "the installation of software without consumer consent that exposed consumers' computers to security risks was unfair and violated federal law." Hiding the software and failing to provide a way to remove it were also violations of U.S. law, the FTC said. The company will have to offer its removal program for another two years and will have to continue allowing customers to exchange CDs with the concealed software purchased before December 31, 2006. The company will also have to provide retailers with financial inducements to return XCP infected CDs and allow the FTC to continue to monitor its compliance with the consent decree.
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LOS ANGELES - Sony BMG Music Entertainment and online peer-to-peer software distributor Grokster are working on a new venture that is expected to offer paid and free song downloads over the Internet, sources say.
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The settlement between Sony BMG Music Entertainment and the states of California and Texas also includes free albums for affected consumers. In Listening Post.
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The Warner Music Group, Viacom and the Universal Music Group are the final bidders for the BMG Music Publishing unit.
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Music publishers and U.S. commercial radio station owners said on Monday they had agreed to a new &#36;1.7 billion deal to cover licensing rights for music played over radio airwaves or via radio station Web sites.
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Sony BMG Music Entertainment will crack open the door to its music vaults on Jan. 15, taking the DRM copy-prevention wrapper off a limited selection of downloadable tracks.The tracks will be offered in MP3 format, without DRM (digital rights management), from Jan. 15 in the U.S. and from late January in Canada.The move is far from the all-digital service offered by its rivals, though. To obtain the Sony-BMG tracks, would-be listeners will first have to go to a retail store to buy a Platinum MusicPass, a card containing a secret code, for a suggested retail price of $12.99. Once they have scratched off the card&#39;s covering to expose the code, they will be able to download one of just 37 albums available through the service, including Britney Spears&#39; &quot;Blackout&quot; and Barry Manilow&#39;s &quot;The Greatest Songs of the Seventies.&quot;In contrast, online retailer&#160;Amazon.com offers 2.9 million DRM-free tracks&#160;in MP3 format from the catalogs of EMI Group, Warner Music Group, Universal Music and a host of independent record labels. Apple&#39;s&#160;iTunes Store has around 2 million DRM-free tracks&#160;in the AAC format supported by its iPod and many mobile phones. No store visit is necessary to download those tracks, and an album typically sells for $9.99 or less.About 4,500 retail outlets in the U.S. will sell the Platinum MusicPass cards by the end of the month, including Best Buy, Target, Trans World, Fred&#39;s, and Winn-Dixie, according to Sony-BMG. In Canada, the cards will sell through Best Buy, CD Plus, and Wal-Mart, and later through record store HMV.Online sales will &quot;ultimately be part of the game plan&quot; for at least one of those retail outlets, said a source familiar with the offering.With Valentine&#39;s Day approaching, Sony-BMG is counting on demand for gift cards to boost sales of the downloads, as well as the collectible nature of the cards themselves, which feature images of the artists and information about the albums.Sony-BMG will offer &quot;expanded&quot; versions of two of the initial offerings -- Celine Dion&#39;s &quot;Taking Chances&quot; and Kenny Chesney&#39;s &quot;Just Who I Am: Poets &amp; Pirates.&quot; These will retail for around $19.99 and in addition to the Platinum version will also include an additional album from the artist&#39;s back catalog.When they first considered online music sales, major record labels initially insisted that download services such as Apple&#39;s iTunes Store encrypt their tracks with DRM technology to prevent copying.Smaller labels sold unprotected MP3 files through sites like eMusic.com, gambling that the increased sales and notoriety that would come with easier access to their music would outweigh sales lost through unauthorized copying.That argument eventually won favor with Apple, which last May began offering tracks from EMI without DRM for a small premium, later bringing the price down to the same $0.99 it charges for other tracks with DRM.Amazon followed suit in September, selling unprotected MP3 files from EMI and Universal. Warner joined them on Dec. 28.The record companies all say they hope the move will lead to greater online music sales.Sony-BMG said it hopes its combined model, selling a download pass through a physical store, will lead to greater sales of physical and digital music.Albums need a boost, as the number sold in the U.S. dropped again last year, even as the number of music purchases rose, market watcher Nielsen SoundScan reported last week.U.S. music buyers made 1.4 billion music purchases in 2007, up from 1.2 billion a year earlier, Nielsen said.Nielsen counts a purchase as an album, single, CD or online download. Within that figure, digital track sales rose from 582 million to 844 million as buyers cherry-picked the tracks they liked from albums available online, while physical album sales (whether sold in-store or over the Internet, but excluding downloads) fell to 451 million in 2007, from 556 million in 2006, it said.But if U.S. consumers are making more music purchases, they may be spending less: Nielsen also counts something it calls track-equivalent album sales, in which it counts 10 track downloads as the equivalent of an album. By that measure, track-equivalent album sales fell 9.5 percent to 585 million in 2007, from 646 million in 2007.&#160;
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Napster, the subscription music-download service, is looking for a buyer. The company -- which got its start as a free music-download, file-sharing site -- said Sept. 18 that it has hired UBS Investment Bank to find a major strategic partner or to be acquired completely.
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The U.S. Department of Justice has requested information from Sony BMG and Universal Music Group about their talks to launch an online music subscription service, said a record company executive on Thursday.
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Music publishers and U.S. commercial  radio station owners said on Monday they had agreed to a new  $1.7 billion deal to cover licensing rights for music played  over radio airwaves or via radio station Web sites.
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Independent record companies said Wednesday they have decided to file a court challenge to the merger of Sony Music and BMG, the music unit of Germany&#39;s Bertelsmann.
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EU regulators on Friday opened an antitrust probe of Universal Music Group's plans to buy BMG Music Publishing for about $2.1 billion, saying the deal could damage "the already concentrated music publishing market."
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BERLIN -- Vivendi agreed to pay $2.09 billion to acquire the BMG Music Publishing Group from media company Bertelsmann yesterday in a deal that will give the French company the world's largest music publishing catalog and songs by artists such as Coldplay and Robbie Williams.