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MUSIC

Jay Z set to buy Norway’s Wimp

US rap star Jay Z made a $56-million foray into the music streaming business Friday, buying Norway's Wimp in a bid to compete with giants like Spotify and Apple.

Published: 30 January 2015 14:12 CET

The platinum-selling artist and businessman used his controlling stake in Project Panther Bidco to launch a 464-million-kronor ($56-million) bid for Aspiro, the Swedish-listed company that owns Norwegian streaming service Wimp.

Jay Z's company confirmed the bid in a statement on Friday as competition heats up in the music streaming market.

"I think they will be a better owner to lift Aspiro and its advanced music streaming service to a new level," said Trond Berger, the financial director of Norwegian media group Schibsted, currently Aspiro's majority owner.

At the end of the third quarter of 2014, Wimp said it had 512,000 paying users in Germany, Poland and the Nordic countries.

Spotify 'not worried' 

That is a far cry from its Nordic rival Spotify, a pioneer in the streaming music business. The unlisted company boasted 15 million paying subscribers in mid-January and is available in 58 countries.

Norwegian business daily Dagens Naeringsliv reported that Jay Z's company was particularly interested in Wimp's high-fidelity Tidal streaming service which is being launched on the US market.

"The Wimp/Tidal service has the potential for greatness, given that it has high-end audio capabilities," music specialist Simon Dyson at corporate analytics firm Ovum told AFP in an email, adding that the $56-million price tag was "not excessive".

Wimp would need substantial investments to challenge Spotify or US tech giant Apple's widely expected entry into the market later this year after acquiring Beats Music from another rap star, Dr Dre, in 2014.

The deal — which also included Beats Electronics — was completed at $3.2 billion.

"The sector is still relatively small and there is room for quite a few big players, for now at least," Dyson added.

"I don't think anyone at Spotify will be worried about the Wimp/Tidal news," Dyson said, stressing that Spotify would likely use a reported round of new private financing to expand even further.

'Apple waiting in the wings' 

Spotify has hired US bank Goldman Sachs to raise around $500 million in a new round of funding, the Financial Times reported Thursday, pushing back a stock-exchange listing for the Swedish startup that analysts have long said is around the corner.

The company declined to comment on the report.

"The undercurrent to all this is Apple waiting in the wings," Mark Mulligan, a music industry analyst, told AFP.

"When Apple launches sometime later this year it's going to be the first serious competition Spotify will have."

In addition to several music-related ventures Jay Z has branched out into fashion and last year bought the champagne brand Armand de Brignac which boasts an ace of spades on its label.

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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