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Warner Music Group is one of the four major record labels. WMG also has a publishing arm, Warner-Chappell Music which dates back to 1929, when Jack Warner, president of Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., founded Music Publishers Holding Company (“MPHC”) to acquire music copyrights as a means of providing inexpensive music for films. Amongst the historic compositions in which the publishing rights are controlled by WMG are the works of Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Its printed music operation, Warner Bros. Publications, was sold to Alfred Publishing on June 1, 2005. WMG's roots in what became Time Warner date back to the founding of Warner Bros. Records as a division of the Warner Bros. movie studio in 1958. After Warner Bros. became Warner Bros.-Seven Arts in 1967, it purchased Atlantic Records, now WMG's oldest label. When its successor Kinney National Company bought Elektra Records in 1970 and then became Warner Communications in 1972, it assembled the three labels into a group then known as WEA (Warner-Elektra-Atlantic); that name was also used as a label outside the U.S. (WMG's current logo is the former Warner Communications logo.) Warner Communications eventually merged with Time Inc. to form Time Warner. Time Warner sold the company in 2004 to a group of investors led by Edgar Bronfman, Jr. for $2.6 billion. Time Warner was reportedly attempting to reduce its debt load. This spinoff was completed on February 27, 2004. In the 2004 transition to independent ownership, WMG hired record industry heavyweight Lyor Cohen from Universal Music Group to attempt to reduce cost and increase performance. On May 3, 2006, WMG apparently rejected a buyout offer from EMI*. Then WMG offered to buy EMI and they also rejected the offer. The two companies are still having meetings over if one of the companies will get bought by the other.
List of Warner labels Warner Music Group's labels include: Independent record labels distributed by Warner Music Group Executive Officers Trivia See also | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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