Guy Hands and his team at the high flying venture capital firm Terra Firma have been chewing sour grapes ever since their purchase of recording giant EMI for £2.4 billion. They have been in court with their lenders Citibank over bad advice during the sale of the label, and have been practically walking on water to meet the huge cash demand of the interest payments on their gigantic loan (although they stopped short of selling off the Abbey Rd. Studios to get a cash fix). Now they are again scrabbling around to find £120 million to plug a covenant breach on the same loan, and a deal is in the offing from WMG to buy the still-profitable music publishing arm of EMI, an asset it’s been coveting over the garden fence for decades. Any bid for the £1.2 billion publishing arm is probably going to be made after EMI have cleared or defaulted on their next interest payment, in the first case, making an offer to EMI and Terra Firma, and in the second, talking to their creditor Citi if the company goes into receivership.
Not satisfied with signing up it’s music and video content to the most successful US video streaming website of 2009, Vevo, WMG has done a deal with internet TV streaming site Hulu for access to the same content.
The agreement brings an artist-focused online video experience that features music videos, artist interviews, live concerts and rare behind the scenes footage from WMG’s world-renowned artists and labels including Atlantic Records, Rhino Records and Warner Bros. Records.
This is a pretty agressive drive towards monetising WMG’s content online, and a sign the big 4 are beginning to adapt and respond to the loss of physical sales and the rise of file sharing, instead of just digging their heels in and waiting for the courts to prosecute a solution for them.
Acclaim has decided that they didnt want to battle Guitar Hero and Rock Band and instead have launched an online music game called Rockfree. Players can battle it out with up to seven other people over the internet, and it”ll feature licensed tracks including Iron Man, Fat Lip, and Woman. A closed beta kicked off this weekend, with a full launch scheduled for the first quarter of next year.
WMG, Sony and EMI are on board for licensing – which indicates that Acclaim is ponying up a decent amount of cash for song rights, since WMG is apparently playing hardball on this score with games publishers right now.
Currently, the game is free to play so it is going to be very interesting to see if Acclaim will make money from advertising, or even push though affiliate sales to iTunes and Amazon. All I know is that this is a very interesting idea and it is good to see that Acclaim is moving away from just being a console publisher and now turning into a real games publisher.
