A month after writing off its entire investment in music social-networking site Imeem, Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) is increasing its stake in the company. AllThingsD reports that Warner is getting a bigger piece of the company in exchange for a new licensing deal in which Imeem will pay Warner less each month for the use of its music. CNET confirmed the story. The arrangement is also reportedly related to a new funding round Imeem is expected to close soon. The company raised $2.4 million of the $6.5 million round earlier this month, according to an SEC filing. It’s unlikely, though, that the deal signals that WMG’s view of Imeem’s prospects have changed. CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. said last month that the impact on Warner’s earnings of Imeem and another music startup it owns a stake in, Lala, was “negligible at this stage.” He added at the time that the company did not “intend to make more digital venture capital investments.” And, as AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka says, it’s a “no risk deal” for Warner: “Instead of throwing good money after bad, Warner only has to give it access to its digital music catalog, which doesn’t cost the company a cent, and won’t show up on its books.” It remains to be seen how much the better licensing terms will help Imeem, which has been struggling under the terms of its licensing deals as well as the weak economy. The company put itself up for sale last October—but hasn’t been able to find a buyer. It raised some additional funds in early May that reportedly saved it from an imminent shut down.

A month after writing off its entire investment in music social-networking site Imeem, Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) is increasing its stake in the company. AllThingsD reports that Warner is getting a bigger piece of the company in exchange for a new licensing deal in which Imeem will pay Warner Brothers less each month for the use of its music. CNET confirmed the story. The arrangement is also reportedly related to a new funding round Imeem is expected to close soon. The company raised $2.4 million of the $6.5 million round earlier this month, according to an SEC filing. It’s unlikely, though, that the deal signals that Warner Music Group’s view of Imeem’s prospects have changed. CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. said last month that the impact on Warner’s earnings of Imeem and another music startup it owns a stake in, Lala, was “negligible at this stage.” He added at the time that the company did not “intend to make more digital venture capital investments.” And, as AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka says, it’s a “no risk deal” for Warner: “Instead of throwing good money after bad, Warner only has to give it access to its digital music catalog, which doesn’t cost the company a cent, and won’t show up on its books.” It remains to be seen how much the better licensing terms will help Imeem, which has been struggling under the terms of its licensing deals as well as the weak economy. The company put itself up for sale last October—but hasn’t been able to find a buyer. It raised some additional funds in early May that reportedly saved it from an imminent shut down.

A month after writing off its entire investment in music social-networking site Imeem, Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) is increasing its stake in the company. AllThingsD reports that Warner is getting a bigger piece of the company in exchange for a new licensing deal in which Imeem will pay Warner Brothers less each month for the use of its music. CNET confirmed the story. The arrangement is also reportedly related to a new funding round Imeem is expected to close soon. The company raised $2.4 million of the $6.5 million round earlier this month, according to an SEC filing. It’s unlikely, though, that the deal signals that Warner Music Group’s view of Imeem’s prospects have changed. CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. said last month that the impact on Warner’s earnings of Imeem and another music startup it owns a stake in, Lala, was “negligible at this stage.” He added at the time that the company did not “intend to make more digital venture capital investments.” And, as AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka says, it’s a “no risk deal” for Warner: “Instead of throwing good money after bad, Warner only has to give it access to its digital music catalog, which doesn’t cost the company a cent, and won’t show up on its books.” It remains to be seen how much the better licensing terms will help Imeem, which has been struggling under the terms of its licensing deals as well as the weak economy. The company put itself up for sale last October—but hasn’t been able to find a buyer. It raised some additional funds in early May that reportedly saved it from an imminent shut down.

Others at Google (NSDQ: GOOG) have more technologically complicated jobs, but David Eun, has one of the most difficult as VP of strategic partnerships: make YouTube profitable. Google bought the user-gen phenom for $1.65 billion back in 2006, just as it edged into deals with the major music labels and media companies. Three years later, YouTube is on the outs with Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) and UK music rights managers, is being sued by Viacom (NYSE: VIA)—at the same time as it has new significant deals with Disney (NYSE: DIS) for short-form including ABC and ESPN, Universal Music for VEVO, and, just announced, a BBC Worldwide renewal that includes full-length content.  As for profit, analyst Spencer Wang estimates the site will lose nearly $500 million this year despite boosting revenues an estimated 20 percent to $240 million.  Eun and I spoke recently about outside estimates; the efforts to grow YouTube’s premium business; working with Hulu; plans to add revenue beyond advertising; and the role, if any, YouTube might play with plans by Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) and others to offer premium content online to pay TV subscribers.  We continued the conversation by e-mail. In both formats, the very careful Eun steered away from financial details and a direct answer about profitability, but he managed some coloring between the lines. Below are some edited excerpts: Staci D. Kramer: No matter how much attention you put on the premium efforts, it doesn’t seem like people feel like the nature is changing from user-generated content. David Eun: There’s a tendency to say YouTube is about UGC and UGC equals bad. It’s the dog on the skateboard analogy. Why do you assume your definition of good is my definition of good? When I go into YouTube I see lots of things. I’ll check an NBA clip out, I may watch a Star Trek episode, I may seen an award-winning documentary, and then I might see some really talented individuals who’ve posted songs they composed or maybe I like pet tricks or things dogs do on skateboards. That certainly hasn’t stopped Letterman. I think that’s one of the disconnects, because when you’re talking about the cat on the skateboard, it’s not always derisively but I think it can be perceived that way. What I think it’s saying, there’s different kinds of content but there’s content that I want to watch and have a laugh at and there’s content I want my ad next to. We have content that isn’t UGC, tons of content that isn’t UGC—we have more so-called premium content than anyone else on the web and we’re monetizing hundreds of millions of views of that stuff. It is incorrect to say YouTube is just about UGC. We certainly are and proud of it, but that’s not just who we are. If people want to put us in the UGC-only bucket, it’s one dimensional. What is an ad worth next to UGC compared with one next to Star Trek? We don’t monetize UGC today. Let me take that back—we’ve identified top providers of UGC on the site and have made many our partners and have deals with them. We monetize their content.  We don’t monetize everything on the site, as you know. Our experience has been that advertisers are fine with content as long as it speaks to them and the type of users they’re trying to get their products in front of, regardless of the source. Where there’s been a question is putting an ad in front of content they haven’t been able to have complete confidence about. This idea that advertisers don’t like UGC is a huge overstatement. But will they pay the same for that touch? They’re not paying for the content. They’re paying for the audience and for the performance around it. Some of our most successful campaigns have been advertisers soliciting UGC directly from our users. They’re paying in some respects higher for UGC; they want the proximity to the content. They want the familiarity with the content. We’re trying to connect with the goals advertisers have of reaching certain types of people on YouTube and a lot of the time it is UGC content. We are trying to get smarter about that and we are getting more sophisticated in the way that we can offer up all sorts of different content. What we’ve been trying to do is create a sense of infinite choice to our users. In some cases, they really want top Hollywood content or content from the major record labels. We want to provide that for them but they also want access to lots of different content, content they would never have seen elsewhere and sometimes getting access to that content requires different monetization models and we recognize that. In the past, it’s been about short form and monetizing purely through advertising. Internally—and I may have more on this in the future—we’re exploring other monetization paths beyond advertising. You’ve been working on a few different things that are already part of the makeup of the site. How is click-to-buy working? (YouTube has stressed click-to-buy, where users can watch a music video, for instance, and then click through to buy the song, as a potentially key revenue component for partners.) What that’s related to is this idea of getting the right ad against the right content and in front of the right audience. There’s been some major changes over the past 12-18 months where we say to our direct partners we want to support your core businesses. That means allowing you to sell your own ads, to piggyback on the extra distribution we provide. Sometimes it includes new ad formats like the in-stream ads, Google TV Ads and things like click-to-buy. You know we don’t really make money on click-to-buy (partners get the majority)—we’re sending traffic and leads out to online retailers and we know that supports our partners’ businesses. Let’s get some clarity though. Does YouTube have the potential to make money on click-to-buy? We don’t look to it as a profit center. We look at it as a complimentary feature we provide to people who partner with us. So far, there are a lot of people who aren’t looking at much of anything on YouTube as a profit center yet—if profit center means actually profit. That’s the outside view. We don’t see all your numbers. It’s a sort of constant refrain. Today, someone sent me a note about the smaller online video operations having problems and the underlying theme was if YouTube’s having problems how are they going to make it. How do you answer that and stay within your guidelines of not talking about money? We’re monetizing hundreds of millions of video views a month and that’s more monthly views total than our closest competitors. So we’re monetizing more views than they have total views. The results we’re seeing on the monetization front are encouraging. … What we just announced recently with connecting the AdSense for video ads—I don’t know if you caught that, most people frankly didn’t—but we now have the huge reach and analytical power of our Google content network, which covers 80 percent of U.S. internet audiences, and we’re tying that to YouTube as a way to increase the advertising sell through on YouTube. Even when our direct partners can’t sell their own inventory, we’re backfilling it with AdSense. We’re bring a certain amount of measurability and accountability and huge insights about what’s going on. You add this to the fact that last year we did business with 70 of the top 100 AdAge marketers. We’re continuing to push the envelope just on advertising. As I implied before, we’re even thinking about things beyond advertising but it’s still early days and we’re patient. ... We have the luxury to test things out and to get it right for our partners. We do not think it is about one single model or one single type of ad or monetization approach. As to the other stuff about our costs and revenues, these folks don’t have access to our numbers. They have no idea how efficiently we host and serve our content. Without having access to that, is it still fair to say that YouTube is spending more it’s making? I can’t comment on that. Let me put it to you this way: I know that we’re monetizing more than anyone else is making and I know that our costs are significantly lower than what anyone else is serving up and hosting. Can you afford to keep growing? We can afford to keep growing if we continue to improve the monetization at the rate we’re improving it. … We’ve already made tough decisions, some of which have gone public, where I’ve said ‘we’re not going to feature certain types of content from partners’ or certain types in certain geographies because people whose approvals we need have presented business models that are not sustainable for us so we won’t do it. We’re not going to make content available if the business model around it is not sustainable. Can YouTube do more off site, maybe white label? For instance, working with a partner like Universal on VEVO, which isn’t branded YouTube, but also the possibility that you could do another content provider’s site without a YouTube partnership. We know that monetization and growth is very promising. In the case of VEVO, music content is really popular, of all sorts. What we’ve done is established a partnership where we’re the technology company, they’re the content provider. They’ll be streaming their content through a player we build and it’s going be on a site they’re building called Vevo.com and it’s also going to reside on YouTube. But it’s going to be syndicated all over the web. This idea of doing a closed or walled-garden approach seems particularly dated given how porous and how flexible usage is on the internet. We’ve aligned incentives and there is a sustainable business model here where we get a rev share of all the revenues that are generated across the web. These questions people are asking about whether people will go to Vevo.com or what will happen to the traffic on YouTube in a way becomes immaterial as long as people are viewing that content and enjoying it. There’s an economic upside for us regardless of where that viewing is. We currently aren’t thinking about being some white-label platform so that companies can go a-z and build an experience on top of us. That’s not the way we define our business. However, we’ve from the very beginning allowed people to embed our video player and customize around that. A large number of views come from off of YouTube. Do you see a time when you would automatically make sure there’s pre-roll on anything that goes in an embedded player? We’re thinking through all that. The first thing is what does it do to the user experience? … It would be a mistake to organize around a business model and then try to force the usage around it. It really depends on what we think the users’ reception will be and how effective the advertising could be. We’re going to explore everything because what our partners want is continued favor with our users but what they also want is more distribution and monetization. If embedding prerolls on more content is the way to do that, we’ll explore that. In terms of partnerships and content, we’ve had a couple of high-profile deals with Disney recently—long-form with Hulu and short-form with you—and (Disney CEO) Bob Iger was pretty clear that they don’t necessarily see putting their content on Hulu as a stopping point to being on YouTube. Is Hulu a potential negotiator with you and could YouTube be a distribution point for Hulu? I think from the very beginning, whenever people have asked me about Hulu I’ve said a couple of things: they’ve done a pretty good job getting consumers used to full-length content with ads. They deserve credit for that. We’ve always felt the space is big enough for multiple players. The Google approach to all this is that everyone can be a partner. But we’re very different companies. Hulu is a TV model brought online, owned and created by TV companies. YouTube is more of an open democratic platform and anyone from a filmmaker to a major studio can find a voice on our platform. When it comes to Hulu [representing Disney and the others] never say never but our approach in the past has been to work directly with our partners because we want to hear exactly what they want and we want to give them exactly what they want. And frankly, they would rather have a bigger cut of the revenues we create for them. Many of our partners also partner with Hulu. We don’t require “exclusive” deals. We actually don’t think that’s the right thing to do for our partners. Is there a role for YouTube to play in what is being described as authentication by some, as TV Everywhere by Jeff Bewkes? We think it’s a really interesting concept and a big idea. For some similar reasons, we’ve been committed to a ‘YouTube Everywhere’ approach for a while. Our syndication team has done a terrific job getting YouTube integrated into digital cameras, high def tv’s and mobile phones—in fact, over 300 million 3G handsets worldwide at last count. Providing solutions to help the online video market evolve is bigger than any one company or any one offering though. We want to be a critical part of any solution and are open to working with all the relevant parties out there to make this a reality.  While it, of course, has to support the interests of the MSOs and the networks, it ultimately has to work for users. Is the idea of providing some content only to pay tv subscribers antithetical to the Google/YouTube emphasis on not being exclusive and on open access? Open access and non-exclusivity requires that we be open and flexible to our users but to our partners and advertisers as well. We want to provide an experience where everyone wins on YouTube. Focusing on the user and maximizing consumer choice have always been top priorities. If a consumer wants to watch ad-supported full-length content or short clips on YouTube, they’ll be able to do that. If, however, they want to watch a movie just out on DVD, that may require a different business model. We recognize that. Open to us also means accessing different content through different models because we respect the rights of content owners.  We want to build as comprehensive an online video experience as possible for our users, and we recognize that we have to be open, creative and flexible with content owners to do it.

Others at Google (NSDQ: GOOG) have more technologically complicated jobs, but David Eun, has one of the most difficult as VP of strategic partnerships: make YouTube profitable. Google bought the user-gen phenom for $1.65 billion back in 2006, just as it edged into deals with the major music labels and media companies. Three years later, YouTube is on the outs with Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) and UK music rights managers, is being sued by Viacom (NYSE: VIA)—at the same time as it has new significant deals with Disney (NYSE: DIS) for short-form including ABC and ESPN, Universal Music for VEVO, and, just announced, a BBC Worldwide renewal that includes full-length content.  As for profit, analyst Spencer Wang estimates the site will lose nearly $500 million this year despite boosting revenues an estimated 20 percent to $240 million.  Eun and I spoke recently about outside estimates; the efforts to grow YouTube’s premium business; working with Hulu; plans to add revenue beyond advertising; and the role, if any, YouTube might play with plans by Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) and others to offer premium content online to pay TV subscribers.  We continued the conversation by e-mail. In both formats, the very careful Eun steered away from financial details and a direct answer about profitability, but he managed some coloring between the lines. Below are some edited excerpts: Staci D. Kramer: No matter how much attention you put on the premium efforts, it doesn’t seem like people feel like the nature is changing from user-generated content. David Eun: There’s a tendency to say YouTube is about UGC and UGC equals bad. It’s the dog on the skateboard analogy. Why do you assume your definition of good is my definition of good? When I go into YouTube I see lots of things. I’ll check an NBA clip out, I may watch a Star Trek episode, I may seen an award-winning documentary, and then I might see some really talented individuals who’ve posted songs they composed or maybe I like pet tricks or things dogs do on skateboards. That certainly hasn’t stopped Letterman. I think that’s one of the disconnects, because when you’re talking about the cat on the skateboard, it’s not always derisively but I think it can be perceived that way. What I think it’s saying, there’s different kinds of content but there’s content that I want to watch and have a laugh at and there’s content I want my ad next to. We have content that isn’t UGC, tons of content that isn’t UGC—we have more so-called premium content than anyone else on the web and we’re monetizing hundreds of millions of views of that stuff. It is incorrect to say YouTube is just about UGC. We certainly are and proud of it, but that’s not just who we are. If people want to put us in the UGC-only bucket, it’s one dimensional. What is an ad worth next to UGC compared with one next to Star Trek? We don’t monetize UGC today. Let me take that back—we’ve identified top providers of UGC on the site and have made many our partners and have deals with them. We monetize their content.  We don’t monetize everything on the site, as you know. Our experience has been that advertisers are fine with content as long as it speaks to them and the type of users they’re trying to get their products in front of, regardless of the source. Where there’s been a question is putting an ad in front of content they haven’t been able to have complete confidence about. This idea that advertisers don’t like UGC is a huge overstatement. But will they pay the same for that touch? They’re not paying for the content. They’re paying for the audience and for the performance around it. Some of our most successful campaigns have been advertisers soliciting UGC directly from our users. They’re paying in some respects higher for UGC; they want the proximity to the content. They want the familiarity with the content. We’re trying to connect with the goals advertisers have of reaching certain types of people on YouTube and a lot of the time it is UGC content. We are trying to get smarter about that and we are getting more sophisticated in the way that we can offer up all sorts of different content. What we’ve been trying to do is create a sense of infinite choice to our users. In some cases, they really want top Hollywood content or content from the major record labels. We want to provide that for them but they also want access to lots of different content, content they would never have seen elsewhere and sometimes getting access to that content requires different monetization models and we recognize that. In the past, it’s been about short form and monetizing purely through advertising. Internally—and I may have more on this in the future—we’re exploring other monetization paths beyond advertising. You’ve been working on a few different things that are already part of the makeup of the site. How is click-to-buy working? (YouTube has stressed click-to-buy, where users can watch a music video, for instance, and then click through to buy the song, as a potentially key revenue component for partners.) What that’s related to is this idea of getting the right ad against the right content and in front of the right audience. There’s been some major changes over the past 12-18 months where we say to our direct partners we want to support your core businesses. That means allowing you to sell your own ads, to piggyback on the extra distribution we provide. Sometimes it includes new ad formats like the in-stream ads, Google TV Ads and things like click-to-buy. You know we don’t really make money on click-to-buy (partners get the majority)—we’re sending traffic and leads out to online retailers and we know that supports our partners’ businesses. Let’s get some clarity though. Does YouTube have the potential to make money on click-to-buy? We don’t look to it as a profit center. We look at it as a complimentary feature we provide to people who partner with us. So far, there are a lot of people who aren’t looking at much of anything on YouTube as a profit center yet—if profit center means actually profit. That’s the outside view. We don’t see all your numbers. It’s a sort of constant refrain. Today, someone sent me a note about the smaller online video operations having problems and the underlying theme was if YouTube’s having problems how are they going to make it. How do you answer that and stay within your guidelines of not talking about money? We’re monetizing hundreds of millions of video views a month and that’s more monthly views total than our closest competitors. So we’re monetizing more views than they have total views. The results we’re seeing on the monetization front are encouraging. … What we just announced recently with connecting the AdSense for video ads—I don’t know if you caught that, most people frankly didn’t—but we now have the huge reach and analytical power of our Google content network, which covers 80 percent of U.S. internet audiences, and we’re tying that to YouTube as a way to increase the advertising sell through on YouTube. Even when our direct partners can’t sell their own inventory, we’re backfilling it with AdSense. We’re bring a certain amount of measurability and accountability and huge insights about what’s going on. You add this to the fact that last year we did business with 70 of the top 100 AdAge marketers. We’re continuing to push the envelope just on advertising. As I implied before, we’re even thinking about things beyond advertising but it’s still early days and we’re patient. ... We have the luxury to test things out and to get it right for our partners. We do not think it is about one single model or one single type of ad or monetization approach. As to the other stuff about our costs and revenues, these folks don’t have access to our numbers. They have no idea how efficiently we host and serve our content. Without having access to that, is it still fair to say that YouTube is spending more it’s making? I can’t comment on that. Let me put it to you this way: I know that we’re monetizing more than anyone else is making and I know that our costs are significantly lower than what anyone else is serving up and hosting. Can you afford to keep growing? We can afford to keep growing if we continue to improve the monetization at the rate we’re improving it. … We’ve already made tough decisions, some of which have gone public, where I’ve said ‘we’re not going to feature certain types of content from partners’ or certain types in certain geographies because people whose approvals we need have presented business models that are not sustainable for us so we won’t do it. We’re not going to make content available if the business model around it is not sustainable. Can YouTube do more off site, maybe white label? For instance, working with a partner like Universal on VEVO, which isn’t branded YouTube, but also the possibility that you could do another content provider’s site without a YouTube partnership. We know that monetization and growth is very promising. In the case of VEVO, music content is really popular, of all sorts. What we’ve done is established a partnership where we’re the technology company, they’re the content provider. They’ll be streaming their content through a player we build and it’s going be on a site they’re building called Vevo.com and it’s also going to reside on YouTube. But it’s going to be syndicated all over the web. This idea of doing a closed or walled-garden approach seems particularly dated given how porous and how flexible usage is on the internet. We’ve aligned incentives and there is a sustainable business model here where we get a rev share of all the revenues that are generated across the web. These questions people are asking about whether people will go to Vevo.com or what will happen to the traffic on YouTube in a way becomes immaterial as long as people are viewing that content and enjoying it. There’s an economic upside for us regardless of where that viewing is. We currently aren’t thinking about being some white-label platform so that companies can go a-z and build an experience on top of us. That’s not the way we define our business. However, we’ve from the very beginning allowed people to embed our video player and customize around that. A large number of views come from off of YouTube. Do you see a time when you would automatically make sure there’s pre-roll on anything that goes in an embedded player? We’re thinking through all that. The first thing is what does it do to the user experience? … It would be a mistake to organize around a business model and then try to force the usage around it. It really depends on what we think the users’ reception will be and how effective the advertising could be. We’re going to explore everything because what our partners want is continued favor with our users but what they also want is more distribution and monetization. If embedding prerolls on more content is the way to do that, we’ll explore that. In terms of partnerships and content, we’ve had a couple of high-profile deals with Disney recently—long-form with Hulu and short-form with you—and (Disney CEO) Bob Iger was pretty clear that they don’t necessarily see putting their content on Hulu as a stopping point to being on YouTube. Is Hulu a potential negotiator with you and could YouTube be a distribution point for Hulu? I think from the very beginning, whenever people have asked me about Hulu I’ve said a couple of things: they’ve done a pretty good job getting consumers used to full-length content with ads. They deserve credit for that. We’ve always felt the space is big enough for multiple players. The Google approach to all this is that everyone can be a partner. But we’re very different companies. Hulu is a TV model brought online, owned and created by TV companies. YouTube is more of an open democratic platform and anyone from a filmmaker to a major studio can find a voice on our platform. When it comes to Hulu [representing Disney and the others] never say never but our approach in the past has been to work directly with our partners because we want to hear exactly what they want and we want to give them exactly what they want. And frankly, they would rather have a bigger cut of the revenues we create for them. Many of our partners also partner with Hulu. We don’t require “exclusive” deals. We actually don’t think that’s the right thing to do for our partners. Is there a role for YouTube to play in what is being described as authentication by some, as TV Everywhere by Jeff Bewkes? We think it’s a really interesting concept and a big idea. For some similar reasons, we’ve been committed to a ‘YouTube Everywhere’ approach for a while. Our syndication team has done a terrific job getting YouTube integrated into digital cameras, high def tv’s and mobile phones—in fact, over 300 million 3G handsets worldwide at last count. Providing solutions to help the online video market evolve is bigger than any one company or any one offering though. We want to be a critical part of any solution and are open to working with all the relevant parties out there to make this a reality.  While it, of course, has to support the interests of the MSOs and the networks, it ultimately has to work for users. Is the idea of providing some content only to pay tv subscribers antithetical to the Google/YouTube emphasis on not being exclusive and on open access? Open access and non-exclusivity requires that we be open and flexible to our users but to our partners and advertisers as well. We want to provide an experience where everyone wins on YouTube. Focusing on the user and maximizing consumer choice have always been top priorities. If a consumer wants to watch ad-supported full-length content or short clips on YouTube, they’ll be able to do that. If, however, they want to watch a movie just out on DVD, that may require a different business model. We recognize that. Open to us also means accessing different content through different models because we respect the rights of content owners.  We want to build as comprehensive an online video experience as possible for our users, and we recognize that we have to be open, creative and flexible with content owners to do it.

Total Digital Revenue Grows to $184 Million; Digital Revenue Represents 35% of U.S. Recorded Music Revenue

Begins Preview Performances March 1, 2010 With an Opening Night of March 25, 2010 at Broadway's Marquis Theatre

New Partnership Debuts With Rich Content Offering From British Rock Sensation Muse; New Artist Pages Featuring Jason Mraz and Paramore to Launch in Early 2010

Warner Music Group Corp (WMG)

F1Q10 (Qtr End 12/31/09) Earnings Call

February 9, 2010 8:30 am ET

Complete Story »

Question-and-Answer SessionOperator (Operator's Instructions) The first question is from Bishop Sheen from Wells Fargo. Bishop Sheen - Wells Fargo Hi, Edgar, Steve, Michael and Jill. Thank you for taking the question. Edgar, when you talk about how challenging domestic has been, as you look...

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  -- Total revenue of $918 million increased 3% from the prior-yearquarter, and declined 2% on a constant-currency basis. -- Digital revenue was $184 million, or 20% of total revenue, flatsequentially from the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, and up 8% from$171 million in the...

Warner Music Group Corp. (WMG) has a negative book value and operates in a distressed industry. Significant risks make WMG an excellent short candidate for 2010

BloggingStocks: Analyst upgrades: Deutsche Bank upgraded Research in Motion (RIMM) to Hold from Sell to reflect the company's Q3 results and guidance. The firm raised its target price on shares to $75 from $60. Keefe Bruyette upgraded Northern Trust (NTRS) and ... Read more

BloggingStocks: Here are some highlights from this past week's earnings coverage on BloggingStocks: American Eagle Outfitters Inc. (AEO) Q3 results were so-so, and it declined to offer a Q4 outlook. Benihana Inc. (BNHNA) was downgraded following its ... Read more

Murdoch Talks Plans: Could WSJ Be Free?, WMG Earnings and Dealing
with Digital (NWS) (WMG) (DJ)

The Hollywood Reporter Reports – Georg Calls From Ca, DJ Inches Closer, WMG Says No Thanks, and Google Takes a Bullet (GOOG) (YHOO) (WMG) (DJ) (NWS)

Sun Valley is host the dozens of media moguls this week where deal making is at a peak for the industry. Murdoch is probably the most visible CEO but listen to the cast for notes on Joost, NING, and Dow Jones. The Buggles sang Video Killed the Radio Star. Life seems to be imitating art these days as YouTube accelerates, Emmis shifts down another gear. The Money and Media podcast, features on StreetIQ, is now a simple application you can add to your Facebook profile. Add Georg and Stephen as your friends http://apps.facebook.com/streetiq (GOOG) (AAPL) (DTV) (WMG) (EMMS) (GMST) (NWS)

The Hollywood Reporter Reports: Mid-Year Stock Update, Movie and a Slurpee?, Media Moguls Group in Sun Valley (SNE) (CBS) (WMG) (BBI) (VMED) (DIS)

The New Price Wars, Dow Jones Update and The Newspaper Effect, Sue Decker Profile... Biker Chick? (YHOO) (DJ) (WMG) (AAPL) (MNI) (BBI) (NFLX) (MOVI) (NWS)