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MUSIC

Bertelsmann reportedly keen to sell Sony BMG stake

German media group Bertelsmann is in talks with Japanese partner Sony to sell its half in their jointly owned music company Sony BMG, a newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Each has owned half of the music publishing firm since 2004, and Sony has an option to buy should Bertelsmann decide to sell its stake, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper said, without identifying its source. A Bertelsmann spokesman contacted by AFP declined to comment on the report.

The newspaper explained that Bertelsmann boss Hartmut Ostrowski has decided to get out of the music business owing to falling sales caused by internet downloads.

The German group began its withdrawal from the sector two years ago when it sold the rights to BMG Music Publishing’s catalogue to Vivendi. Bertelsmann and Sony have not yet agreed on a price for their deal, but it could nonetheless be finalised within a few months, the report said.

Bertelsmann is also active in television with the RTL group, publishing, with Gruner + Jahr and Random House, services, and book and record clubs.

Those clubs are currently being restructured however, and a partial sale is also expected at some point.

Sony BMG is one of the biggest music companies worldwide, and currently has contracts with singers including Alicia Keys, Celine Dion and Britney Spears.

CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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