CBS, every mention

SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours) · Acquired Mar 7, 2022 · 18 mentions

• ▶ 49:33 David Rosenthal So before the war, CBS had negotiated a merger with a record company in Japan
• ▶ 50:03 Ben Gilbert Because the C in CBS stands for Columbia?
• ▶ 50:27 Ben Gilbert These companies, Columbia Pictures and CBS, where the C stands from Columbia, chose the word Columbia completely independently, and that is not true.
• ▶ 50:57 David Rosenthal CBS, newly re-interested in Japan, they're looking for a partner to set up a JV to access the Japanese recorded music market.
• ▶ 51:08 David Rosenthal Marita hears about this and hears that a CBS executive named Harvey Shine is over to handle this matter for CBS.
• ▶ 51:25 David Rosenthal JV between CBS and Sony will be super flexible on whatever terms you want, and we will make this happen as fast as humanly possible.
• ▶ 52:05 David Rosenthal Which is the Japanese distribution arm of CBS's recorded music in Japan, becomes such a cash cow that within just a few years, it is the most profitable division for both Sony and CBS.
• ▶ 52:49 David Rosenthal CBS records around the world is signing all these artists and producing the music, and this is just distributing it in Japan.
• ▶ 54:24 David Rosenthal They were, because it's a JV, they both had to agree to do distributions, both Sony and CBS, to get the cash back to the parent companies, and they weren't always on the same page.
• ▶ 1:28:25 David Rosenthal CBS gets a corporate raider who comes in and assumes a large stake in the company.
• ▶ 1:28:34 David Rosenthal One Larry Tish buys a large stake in CBS, and there's this cash cow in the JV with Sony and the records business as a whole is a nice business.
• ▶ 1:28:55 David Rosenthal and the like about selling and the folks who are running CBS records at Columbia records, they're not too happy about this.
• ▶ 1:29:13 David Rosenthal Would you be interested in actually buying all of CBS records?
• ▶ 1:29:35 David Rosenthal Like, Sony is a worldwide, large, global brand, so it's not unreasonable to think Sony could buy all of CBS records.
• ▶ 1:31:20 David Rosenthal Sony buys CBS records.
• ▶ 1:32:07 David Rosenthal As of recent years, Sony Music, the core of which is the CBS records business, does over two billion dollars in operating cash flow every single year, and they've owned it for 30 years.
• ▶ 1:32:34 Ben Gilbert But the music segment, Sony music, which comes from CBS records, did, I think, 11, 12% of revenue of the whole company.
• ▶ 1:33:56 David Rosenthal So here's what's interesting in my perspective on these, going back to the CBS records deal.