Give and Take At WMG – Lala and the Bosses
Big numbers fly back and forth in one of WMG’s recent SEC filings – they took a bath on the quick turnaround deal they did buying Lala and selling it again almost immediately to Apple. They will obviously have taken advantage of their brief ownership to Ctrl + C the technology involved in Lala’s service, so keep your eyes peeled for a proprietary store in the near future. Hopefully for them, the value they managed to take out of the company was equal to the $11 million difference between what they bought it for, and the $9 million they sold it to Apple for. The accounts department can’t be too unhappy at the moment, as they’ve signed cheques to the directors for nearly double their 2007 income – $14 million in various different forms, salary, bonuses etc.