{"id":86390,"date":"2020-06-24T11:22:50","date_gmt":"2020-06-24T10:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/?post_type=companies&p=86390"},"modified":"2021-02-04T16:53:51","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T16:53:51","slug":"bmg","status":"publish","type":"companies","link":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/companies\/bertelsmann\/bmg\/","title":{"rendered":"BMG"},"content":{"rendered":"

Billing itself as “the fourth major music company”<\/a>, BMG has certainly become one of the global music industry’s biggest players since re-emerging as a Bertelsmann-owned independent in October 2008.<\/p>\n

The ‘new’ BMG, led by CEO Hartwig Masuch, emerged following Bertelsmann’s decision to sell off its 50% stake in Sony-BMG to Sony Corp for $1.2 billion in August 2008.<\/a><\/p>\n

That saw BMG let go of a hugely influential (and valuable cataog), and start again from scratch across both recorded music and music publishing.<\/p>\n

\n
Acquisitions<\/h6>\n

BMG quickened its growth with a string of acquisitions in the music publishing space, including buyouts of catalogs from companies like Bug, Cherry Lane, Stage Three, Chrysalis, Primary Wave, Virgin Music and Talpa.<\/p>\n

On the recorded music side, BMG has acquired indie labels\/label catalogs including the likes of Union Square, Mute, Sanctuary<\/a>, Vagrant, S-Curve, Rise and, more recently, hip-hop specialist\u00a0RBC<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In early 2017, Bertelsmann-owned BMG made its largest recorded music acquisition to date, when it bought Nashville-based Broken Bow Music Group (BBMG)\u00a0for just over $100m.<\/a><\/p>\n

Since that Broken Bow acquisition, BMG has focused more on growing organically. Its publishing repertoire now includes more than 3 million songs, representing writers including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Bruno Mars, Jessie Reyez, Bring Me The Horizon and Poo Bear.<\/p>\n

\n
Ownership and financials<\/h6>\n

For four years from 2009 onwards, the investment firm KKR owned 51% of BMG, with Bertelsmann a minority partner, but in 2013, Bertelsmann bought out KKR’s stake to take 100% control of the music company.<\/a><\/p>\n

In 2019, BMG’s company-wide global revenues increased 10.1% year-on-year to \u20ac600m ($674m).<\/a><\/p>\n

Exactly half of BMG\u2019s annual revenues in the year (\u20ac300m \/ $337m) were generated in the United States, with the UK its second most lucrative territory (\u20ac99m \/ $111m).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bertelsmann-owned BMG is led by CEO Hartwig Masuch<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":35123,"parent":98902,"menu_order":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-86390","companies","type-companies","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/companies\/86390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/companies"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/companies"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/companies\/86390\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/companies\/98902"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}