You’ve got to hand it to Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman. The man sure knows how to make shit smell good. The spin doctors went in overdrive today and Wall Street bought it. Warner Music Group this morning reported a revenue drop of 11.2% for its fiscal first quarter (Dec 31) to $878 million. Profit turned back into the black with net income of $23 million – after a $16 million net loss in the year-ago quarter.
But … the only reason Warner turned a profit was the sale of its stake in Front Line Management to Irving Azoff’s Ticketmaster Entertainment last year. That’s important to point out and only few did it as well as Glenn at Coolfer. Wall Street was undeterred, though. WMG stock climbed a ridiculous 24% today to finish at $2.49.
Wake up, people. The music industry a growth business? Bronfman might want you to believe that but his own numbers prove him wrong. All indicators in Warner’s Q1 report point south. And this claim of Warner being a leader in the development of digital business … well, I don’t know how a 19% share of digital in overall revenues qualifies for a leadership position. Both Universal and Sony Music are well north of 20% by now. Hell, even EMI makes 21% of its business with digital formats.
Maybe it’s time for some people to read the WMG assessment by Pali’s Rich Greenfield again.
The fact that Sony Music ended its third fiscal quarter (Dec 31) with sales down 22% shouldn’t get you worried. The company might have just closed its well-known GUN Records subsidiary in Germany but the fundamentals of the major label seem to be strong. German Manager Magazin recently portrayed the company and its CEO, Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, saying that in an adverse environment Sony Music had the best management in the business.
Even though they expect yearly revenues (FY ends March 31) to decline to around $3.6 billion, down by appr. 6.5% from $3.85 billion last year, Sony predicts operating profits to exceed $300 million. That would represent an operating margin of more than 8% – quite a good figure in today’s distressed markets.
Moreover, Sony seems to be really happy with the conditions of the buy-out from Bertelsmann. According to internal files, Bertelsmann will be paid for their half of former Sony BMG mainly by the label’s cashflow. Until the end of the FY Sony will only transfer $126 million in cash to the Germans. 86% of the purchase price will be covered by cashflow from ongoing business.
Even though conservative members of the German grand coalition government have been asserting that they would support pro-copyright legislation that would help strengthening the position of rights owners it increasingly looks like the current administration will not be shaken by the entertainment industry’s push for a “three strikes” rule. Germany’s federal minister of justice (U.S. = attorney general), Brigitte Zypries, a member of the more liberal leaning Social Democrats, recently made it clear she does not want to persue that route.
Zypries had called for a meeting with the six largest internet service providers in the country to discuss how a graduated response model like the one discussed in France could be implemented in Germany. Disconnecting filesharers from the internet seems to be a hot issue in law-making circles. However, Zypries does not see this happening anytime soon. According to her position, the three strikes concept is incompatible with German privacy and telecommunications laws.
“I don’t think that is a fitting model for Germany or even Europe”, Zypries has been quoted. Labels shouldn’t delude themselves. The German government’s opinion sounds determined: “Preventing someone from accessing the Internet seems like a completely unreasonable punishment to me. It would be highly problematic due to both constitutional and political aspects. I’m sure that once the first disconnects are going to happen in France, we will be hearing the outcry all the way to Berlin.”
When Germany’s entertainment distributor TMI filed bankruptcy in late September last year people involved had hoped that there might be a chance to save the business, or at least parts of it. These hopes have now been shattered. Trustees, who already in mid-December had terminated the TMI headquarters in St. Leon-Rot, have now also given up on the remaining TMI locations in Bremen and Alsdorf.
The administrators had been trying to keep up trading throughout the fourth quarter but more and more TMI clients defected to competing ditributors. That basically left the company without sufficient business. In total, some 500 jobs are affected by this collapse. TMI was founded in 1989 and during better times generated annual revenues in the area of €280 million ($360m).
