The head of SonyBMG Germany has told Der Spiegel magazine that he plans to oversee a period of diversification at his company, citing two recent joint ventures in the comedy domain as examples of the major's new direction.
As previously reported, the German music industry has, like many others around the world, seen a considerable slide in CD sales in recent years. While the slide is not quite as acute as that experienced by the US industry, it has been sufficient to motivate the country's record industry trade body, IFPI Germany, to adopt a similar hardline approach to illegal file sharing as that operated by the Recording Industry Association Of America, as a result of which it has issued literally thousands of lawsuits against suspected file sharers in the last six months.
But for record label chiefs like SonyBMG Germany's Edgar Berger, even extensive anti-P2P litigation isn't going to help boost a struggling bottom line, which is why he is advocating developing his company beyond the traditional activities of releasing and licensing recorded music to generate new revenue streams from both music based programmes, but also content initiatives in other areas.
Recently the German major entered into a joint venture with Microsoft to launch a comedy platform called comedy.de, while the label has also joined forces with TV network Brainpool to capitalise on popular comedy series in the DVD space. Berger says that such new ventures will be at the heart of SonyBMG Germany's future development.
By the way, if any of you record label types are looking to branch into comedy, have we ever mentioned that CMU's sister publication ThreeWeeks is the UK's most established comedy media? Or that we are currently developing (and close to launching) a brilliant online comedy platform? Did we mention that? Usual email address if you want to collaborate.