SYCO – Simon Cowell and Sony Create Joint Venture
In a press release last week, Sony BMG has revealed a joint venture between themselves and Simon Cowell’s SYCO media group . This newly created entity will own all of the SYCO TV and media rights to the X-Factor and [insert country here]‘s Got Talent, as well as Cowell’s hit making cash-cow pop stars, including Susan Boyle and Leona Lewis.
As the first project under the new Syco banner, Fox Television announced (on January 11th) that it will launch the U.S. version of the worldwide hit TV show, The X Factor, in the fall of 2011. Cowell will serve as both executive producer and judge on the U.S. version of the show.
In the brief years since moving out of his mum and dad’s house aged 30, Cowell has worked with artists selling more than 180 million albums and delivered more than 150 No.1 records. In 2009, Cowell was named No. 1 in Hollywood Reporter’s Top 50 Most Powerful in Reality TV and one of Entertainment Weekly’s Top Entertainers of the Year, and has one of the most powerful and influential figures in pop music, having fired literally hundreds of young hopefuls up the pop charts with the perfect storm of his TV format and Sony label tie-in.
The new company consolidates the close relationship between Cowell and Sony, and will doubtless mean more years of gushing, well meaning, easily herded young vocalists being fired out of the high-powered marketing cannon into our faces.
