When Warner Music the music label appointed Goldman Sachs to help find buyers early this year, the stock price of the beleaguered music company shot up from an all time low of $6 to $7.7 as everyone from oil tycoons to supermarket moguls and bigger music brands like Sony Universal and WMG showed interest. However Edgar Bronfman Jr. the current owner who incidentally is the cash flush Seagram liquor business heir is keeping his fingers crossed. He knows that his $2.5 billion buy of 2003 may just about sell for the asking price of $3 billion given the consistent drop in CD sales and profitability .

Ever since Napster days the music industry has seen bad times. Though publishing profits are still great and the envy of most industries, the CD market has crashed by 25% as the average annual consumer spending dropped from $60 to $43and profits on new music launches have become paper thin. Rather the music companies have not evolved and still spend more time paying lawyers to sue others for violation of rights then on creating new marketing deals  and avenues of music release.  

Bronfman rightly says, the future of music business is in all round marketing or 360 degree deals where everything from downloads to merchandise to tour ticket sales and CD’s will be handled by a single company.  Most music companies especially the smaller ones like  Warner have not been up to the task and have been losing out on each music release. The hole in their pocket has been because music downloads are infinitely more popular today than DVD or CD sales especially with the younger generation.

 Though Napster no longer exists  Apple’s licensed iTunes pays  a  pittance of 99cents to music labels  as compared to $12 per CD.  Now after Amazon launched its cloud last month Apple has bought the domain iCloud.com at $ 4.5 million and planning to consolidate its delivery service through cloud.  With major launch of its new models due Apple is now readying  both iOS 5.0 and Mac OS X Lion to integrate with a service dubbed “iCloud,” enabling users to sync and store what they currently can with the company’s existing MobileMe service, such as bookmarks, email, contacts and iCal events.  With internet and mobile downloads threatening to skyrocket, Google wants to get into the action too. Marissa Meyer Google’s high profile  VP consumer says music is the next focus for the internet search giant and Google wants to give Apple  a run for the money  in this  segment in future.

October 19, 2010 - Global | Digital and Mobile 
By Antony Bruno, Denver

Former Rhapsody VP of music programming Tim Quirk is heading to Google, according to a vague message he posted to Facebook and Twitter yesterday (Oct. 18). "First day at Google," it reads. 

Exactly what Quirk is doing at Google is not clear, but speculation is already rampant that he'll be heading up the music service the company is known to be working on. In late August, word first broke that Google querying music industry executives on who they thought would be a good person to hire to run such as service. Billboard.biz posted a list of potential candidates at the time, but alas... Quirk was not among them.

Billboard learned more about Google's music plans in September, noting that 
a term sheet making its way to label executives proposes a cloud-based system where users could buy tracks and stream them from any connected device for a yearly fee.

Google has already hired at least one music industry veteran, presumably to help develop the service. Former Davis Shapiro Lewit & Hayes attorney Elizabeth Moody was brought on in July.

Quirk was an early Rhapsody employee, starting with the company prior to its acquisition by RealNetworks. He left the company earlier this year after Rhapsody was spun off into an independent company. But he made headlines late last year while still on board for railing against the label system's process for paying artists for streaming music. Quirk is the former singer for the band Too Much Joy and occasionally performs with the act Wonderlick. He also briefly worked as a music journalist.