AOL Sells Warner Music Group.

That would be ironic considering the 80 Million £s contract Robbie Williams got.
Maybe he will keep EMI alive?

Isn't that logical? Those "big contract" figures assume an extrapolation of past sales. The artist negotiates a certain amount of money per unit sold, and the press office does the math (eg, $2 per unit x 5 albums x 10 million sold of each album = $100 million) and informs the journos. But at the time of the negotiations, the artist is usually at the peak of his career and cannot realistically hope to strike gold 5 times in a row again. The only way is down...

If this deal goes through, EMI will have the two biggest indie distributors (Caroline and ADA) in North America.

there's something about this phrase that makes me uncomfortable

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sonic-Boom-Impossible-Records-Fleetwood/dp/1250301564

that link required me to enter a captcha, then to select and save cookie preferences, then took me to a list of English soccer matches available with a subscription to Bezos Prime in the UK

any chance that the relevant information could be summarised in a sentence or so, or is available elsewhere? nb if it is a Fleetwood Mac biography, no need to bother

It's a book about the history of Warner Brothers Records.

Got a good review from Bob Mehr. Also his Paul Simon book didn't seem bad from what I've read of it.

From journalist Peter Ames Carlin--the New York Times bestselling music biographer who chronicled the lives and careers of Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, the Beach Boys, and Paul Simon--Sonic Boom captures the rollicking story of the most successful record label in the history of rock and roll, Warner Bros Records, and the remarkable secret to its meteoric rise.

The roster of Warner Brothers Records and its subsidiary labels reads like the roster of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, James Taylor, Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Prince, Van Halen, Madonna, Tom Petty, R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers, and dozens of others. But the most compelling figures in the Warner Bros. story are the sagacious Mo Ostin and the unlikely crew of hippies, eccentrics, and enlightened execs who were the first in the music business to read the generational writing on the wall in the mid-1960s. By recruiting outsider artists and allowing them to make the music they wanted, Ostin and his staff transformed an out-of-touch company into the voice of a generation. Along the way, they revolutionized the music industry and, within just a few years, created the most successful record label in the history of the American music industry.
How did they do it? It all goes back to the day in 1967 when the newly tapped label president Mo Ostin called his team together to share his grand strategy for the struggling company: "We need to stop trying to make hit records. Let's just make good records and turn those into hits."
With that, Ostin ushered in a counterintuitive model that matched the counterculture. His offbeat crew reinvented the way business was done, giving their artists free rein while rejecting out-of-date methods of advertising, promotion, and distribution. And even as they set new standards for in-house weirdness, the upstarts' experiments and innovations paid off, to the tune of hundreds of legendary hit albums.
It may sound like a fairy tale, but once upon a time Warner Bros Records conquered the music business by focusing on the music rather than the business. Their story is as raucous as it is inspiring, pure entertainment that also maps a route to that holy grail: love and money.

Could be a cool book. Mary Lou badeaux who used to be VP at WB posted about it on Facebook

Seeing this thread pop up was a surprise. Crazy to think AOL once bought out all of Time-Warner (when it was even bigger than it was today). In retrospect, Warner generally had the right idea or maybe just the right instinct about what they needed to do going forward. Had there been a more coherent vision and a better understanding of the technology, they probably could've developed their own version of Spotify and Netflix's streaming services before they did. Who knows - without a third party like Spotify taking most of the revenue for themselves, it's possible artists royalties wouldn't have been decimated the way they are now.

All the labels could have. But a WB only platform would end up like the Disney one. Would consumers be into platforms based around labels? Idk. Majors weren't humble enough back then to collaborate either.

I looked at the link in Amazon US and was recommended this book: https://www.amazon.com/They-Just-Seem-Little-Weird-ebook/dp/B086SVV49Z

Having just read through the Replacements bio Trouble Boys (excellent), i have an idea about how crazy the Carlin book could be. Seymour Stein (co-founder of Sire) could be a chapter in itself

All the labels could have. But a WB only platform would end up like the Disney one. Would consumers be into platforms based around labels? Idk. Majors weren't humble enough back then to collaborate either.

They would NOT have collaborated, but given how consolidated things had already become, I think it would've been a new technological platform that was also a throwback to old school broadcast - that is, the major labels would have become broadcast/streaming networks. So no, not as consumer friendly, but still viable to mainstream listeners who don't miss owning records as it would have been a familiar model (like watching network TV), just a bit unusual to see it applied to music as well.

Be forewarned, Seymour Stein's book is not that good, but a chapter about him in another book would be good. He makes appearances in other books of course, such as King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records, by Jon Hartley Fox.

Even the Seymour S. stories in Please Kill Me were eye-opening.

Forgot to mention, it would follow the network TV model (which is essentially Spotify's current model) that they don't have to pay to stream any major label's service/channel, as long as they're willing to stream ads. (And to be clear, unlike network TV, the user could still have full control over what they stream just as they do now.)

The one thing the labels might have collaborated on is a universal app or device where you can just switch to a different label/channel rather than needing multiple apps with each one owned by a different label. Streamlining it that way would probably be essential if they wanted to attract enough users.

Some of the labels tried that in the early days (like when Vivendi U bought MP3.com); but by the time high-speed internet made streaming a reality, I doubt any of them could have capitalized, due to their slow-moving, risk-averse nature. In the home entertainment space, the studios teamed for those clunky "digital lockers" (Movies Anywhere vs. UltraViolet) - but even those involved friction / not everyone on board.

(Of course most of the studios now have launched streaming services of their own.)

Book event-
https://www.crowdcast.io/e/pac/register

That's January 19 6 pm (though you have to register but its free) Peter Ames Carlin discusses Sonic Boom: The Impossible Rise of Warner Bros. Records, from Hendrix to Fleetwood Mac to Madonna to Prince

From journalist Peter Ames Carlin--the New York Times bestselling music biographer who chronicled the lives and careers of Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, the Beach Boys, and Paul Simon--Sonic Boom captures the rollicking story of the most successful record label in the history of rock and roll, Warner Bros Records, and the remarkable secret to its meteoric rise.

hmmmm, trying to think if I have ever read any of his books

Writer David Browne says re Doug Brod book -They Just seem a little weird : "Doug Brod gives the '70s hard rock world of KISS, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Starz the scholarly research, historical narrative, and--above all else--respect it deserves..."

Heh. I started reading the sample and decided it wasn’t quite for me, despite the rave reviews from these two guys.

One of Nathan’s employees at the time was a young man named Seymour Steinbigle. Nathan had befriended the Brooklyn teenager a few years earlier, and Steinbigle even spent a summer vacation with Nathan in Cincinnati. Steinbigle, who began working at King full time in 1961, called Nathan “a second father.”

“When I first started working at the company full-time,” he recalled, “I got a phone call, and they started paging me. “Seymour Steinbigle, Seymour Steinbigle.” All of a sudden, over her voice, (Nathan) comes in, “Okay, it’s either Stein or Bigle or back to New York.” It’s been Seymour Stein ever since.

Fox, Jon Hartley. King of the Queen City (Music in American Life) (p. 62). University of Illinois Press.

The next paragraph has this line
Described by Hank Ballard as “a clone of Syd Nathan,”
which I can't find any other reference to.