Officials over there at that there European Commission, who have been busy investigating the Sony BMG merger, announced on Friday that they had put their investigation on hold while they waited to receive key data from the two companies involved.
In a statement, the Commission told reporters: "Please note that the Commission yesterday sent an Article 11 decision to the parties involved in the Sony/BMG merger for failure to provide requested information. This means that the clock has stopped on this case until such time as the information is received".
That decision means that the Commission's final ruling on the merger will now come up to two weeks later than the original 2 Jul deadline. Officials at the Commission, who, as previously reported, announced earlier this month that they were undertaking an "in depth" investigation into the merger, have reportedly requested unprecedented amounts of information from the merger partners - Sony Corp and Bertelsmann - as well as from other affected parties in a bid to prove beyond doubt that whatever conclusion they reach is backed up by a suitably thorough analysis of the impact of the merger. Obviously officials are keen to be seen to be thorough because it was accusations of insufficient evidence that led to the European Courts overturning the Commission's original decision to allow the Sony BMG merger to go ahead.
Explaining the surprisingly large amount of data being requested this time, the Commission stressed on Friday that: "Following the [court] ruling, the Commission has engaged in an extremely complex data collection exercise to be able to satisfy the demanding requirements of [their] judgment".
Although in theory the Commission's latest investigation into the impact of the Sony BMG merger should be easier, given that it is being conducted after the merger has taken place, insiders say investigators are struggling to decide what the impact has been because the record industry has been in a period of such radical change in the years immediately before and after the Sony BMG alliance, mainly because of the growth of digital, that it is hard to draw comparative conclusions on statistics from before and after the merger.