Sony Music Entertainment Executive Summary

Sony have been known worldwide as a Japanese multinational company, its efforts trying to expanding business in United States, have made that Sony acquires CBS Records and Columbia Pictures. Thus, creating Sony Music and Sony Pictures, which represent Sony entertainment. This involved to the company in $1.2 billion of debt, and assigned goodwill assets for $3.8 billion.

“One of the largest and most influential electronics companies during the 20th century was the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA. At one time, the breadth of its operations included everything from making vinyl records to building and manufacturing communications satellites.” (Engineering and Technology History Wiki: RCA (Radio Corporation of America)). Today, RCA stands as of the most popular and successful record labels in the music industry, and it serves more purposes now than ever before. Over the years, RCA has taken on responsibilities such as searching for talent, signing talent, developing the artists (sometimes), recording and producing their artists, promoting and marketing their artists, and exploiting their

Masaru Ibuka founded Sony Corporation in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat during World War II (IJ 106). Following the company’s startup, Ibuka urged Akio Morita, a navy technical lieutenant in thermos optical weapons, to come to Tokyo and join him in the start-up of his new business venture (IJ 106). In May 1946, Sony Corporation was officially established as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha (Kabushiki Kaisha), a joint stock company (SE1).

Back in 2002, Sony geared themselves toward a vertical strategy as reported by Rob Weisenthal, VP and CFO of Sony Corp. of America, “Under the USA umbrella, we undertook a number of vertical initiatives for each operating division. These have already produced significant operational streamlining and financial performance improvements.” As discussed in his release, Weisenthal talked about Sony Pictures Entertainment and their strategy to restructure television operations, where core programming competencies were focused on. Film and television digitalization efforts have been expanded and have engineered a significant reduction in their corporate overhead. In addition, he mentionted that Sony Music has made long

Sony has many products and started to branch out. Sony has mostly started to manufacture appliances and electronics. Even thou many new different products may arise, Sony can manage and maintain their quality.

Good reputation and Distribution networks – Sony as a company has a very good reputation among the customers and they would have no problems in obtaining products from a company like Sony. With its well established network round the world, it would be icing on the cake to introduce a new product into the market.

At the beginning of 2009, 65 percent of purchases in the music market was still attributed to CD sales (Whitney, 2009). On the other hand, our other research has shown strong predictions that CD purchases will continue to steadily decline in the future. This means that Sony needs to find other ways to sell their music.

The music industry is made of companies which produce and sell music. The music industry as we know it was solidified in the mid-twentieth century, where records succeeded sheet music as the primary product in the music business. Record companies were established, but did not last very long until the late 1980s when the “Big Six”, a group of multinational corporations consisting of Sony, MCA, WEA, Polygram, EMI, and BMG controlled most of the market. Initially there were five corporations (CBS and RCA (both now belonging to Sony), WEA, EMI, and Polygram) that had emerged in 1978 to own 60 per cent of the market. (Wallis and Malm, 1984, p. 81)

Sony Music Entertainment was founded in 1929 by the merging of several companies and was known as American Record Corporation. Since then, the company has had a great influence on American pop culture with classic stars such as Elvis Presley and Barbra Streisand to Beyoncé and Britney Spears. Sony Music Entertainment has grown to be a global success receiving almost five billion dollars in revenue in 2014. The company owns numerous other smaller record labels including Columbia Records, Epic Records, Essential Records, and RCA Records. The company is globally recognized and has offices in Europe, South America, Asia, and of course North America. The current Chief Executive Officer is Doug Morris and the current Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer is Kevin Kelleher. During October Rob Stringer, the current chairman and CEO of Columbia was announced to be the new CEO of Sony Music Entertainment.

Sony must reposition its “growth driven” and “stable profit generator” sectors in their markets to increase its audience, achieve sales growth, profit expansion and maximization, and capture market shares.

Since the iTunes music store was introduced on April 28, 2003, gross music sales have plummeted in the United States - from $11.8 billion in 2003 to $7.1 billion in 2012, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (Covert). Counterintuitively, during that time consumers were buying more music than ever. How is that possible? It 's because iTunes had made digital singles popular and was selling them cheap. This would change the music industry forever. In 2000, Americans bought 943 million CD albums (Covert), and digital sales didn’t even make a dent in comparison. But by 2007, those inexpensive singles overtook CDs by a wide margin, generating 819 million sales compared to just 500 million for the CD.

Sony Company is a Japanese multinational corporation. Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita are the founders of the company, in late 1945. The corporation is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is among the leading electronic products manufacturers for consumer products. The company manufactures varied consumer electronics, equipment for video communications, innovative cameras and information technology equipment. It is one of the leading digital entertainment brands globally. It offers customers a range of exciting multimedia content. In the next one and

Over the past decade, the use of CDs has been replaced with online streaming and retailing. This has eliminated much of the record companies revenues as they were used to making most of their profit off of distribution and promotion of physical copies of artists albums (Niemen). This has caused for a major shift and remodeling of major players in the music industries business models. Companies such Sony, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group have started to completely rethink the way they conduct business (Forbes). In the past record labels were not only responsible for production, distribution and promotion of an artist and his/her music, but they also acted as a bank (Forbes), funding the artists tours and recording sessions. Recently, these music giants have been moving towards becoming more of a modular network organization. What this means is that they are less occupied with the nitty gritty, and more focused on what they do best which is distribution and promotion. This also allows for more freedom of creativity for the artist as well as fairer split of profits (Forbes). This adaption of new business models clearly shows the versatility of the music industry in adapting to new times and technologies.

Japan is the home to of the top companies in the world. One of the companies, which has helped Japan’s economy to be one of the top, is Sony. Modern day Sony is a high profit high output company, which is manly due to its marketing strategies and decision to its customers.

Sony has followed later with pioneering contributions to the popularity and success of compact discs, camcorders, computers and floppy discs. Sony links its own expertise in electronics hardware with American completion in software and entertainment.