And then there were four
Billboard.biz reports Bertelsmann has left the building. Sony has reached an agreement to buy out the remaining 50 percent of Bertelsmann’s stake in Sony BMG. Ah, whiter Nipper now?
When I was a teenager, there were six major label conglomerates: Columbia, RCA, Warner Bros., PolyGram, EMI and MCA/Universal. PolyGram and MCA became Universal Music. Sony bought out Columbia, and General Electric, which acquired RCA, sold its recorded division to Bertelsmann. Now that leaves, Sony, Warner Music Group, Universal Music and EMI.
EMI and Warner have been trying to merge for years, but neither can seem to get its act together. It’s entirely scary but not unforeseeable that the major labels, plural, will become the major label, singular. In the past, such a merger would have signified the majors’ strong-armed dominance over all things media, effectively squeezing out independent voices.
That’s not the case now. Mergers now seem more about contraction than growth. These businesses operate on a scale too large to accommodate changes in the market. In other words, fewer people are buying CDs, so do we really need four major labels to supply diminishing demands? Bertlesmann, it seemed, didn’t need a crystal ball to figure out its answer.
Wouldn’t it be great science fiction if, after all those mergers, the eventual mega label turns out as a big as every other independent label?