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Bertelsmann reportedly targeting Warner Music

German media group Bertelsmann and investment fund KKR want to buy the US company Warner Music for up to $3 billion, a press report said Wednesday.

Published: 30 March 2011 11:47 CEST
Bertelsmann reportedly targeting Warner Music
Photo: DPA

Talks with Warner Music will take place in the coming days in New York, sources close to the matter told the business daily Handelsblatt, with one estimating the chances of success at 60 percent.

“Bertelsmann is ready to invest,” boss Thomas Rabe said Tuesday, adding that the group had set aside €1 billion ($1.4 billion) to do so while remaining vague with respect to potential acquisitions.

Bertelsmann and KKR are particularly interested in rights owned by Warner Music to works by musicians like Madonna and Eric Clapton. But distribution operations could be sold on to rivals Universal or Sony, the report suggested.

Getting value from music rights is is the core activity of BMG Rights Management, a venture that is 51 percent owned by KKR and 49 percent by Bertelsmann.

Together they control the copyrights of 2,000 artists and some 300,000 songs.

AFP/mry

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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.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
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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