Sony to buy 60% EMI for $2 billion

Sony is buying EMI Music Publishing, adding two million songs from artists like Alicia Keys, Kanye West and Queen to its already-vast publishing catalog and cementing its position as the world’s largest music publisher. The Japanese corporation is paying around $2 billion for a 60 percent equity stake in EMI, it said on Tuesday.

RollingStone reports that  one music company is buying another isn’t new or unusual – since the 2000s, the industry has become a consolidated landscape of just a handful of players steadily gobbling up the rest – but what is significant is the size of the deal, and what that indicates for the future. Yoshida’s mission is to stabilize the profit from the entertainment side of Sony’s business, so it makes sense for the corporation to control more rights to songs as well as their recordings. (Publishing and recording yield separate revenue streams.)

But for the last 20 years, as digital downloads and piracy usurped physical music, the music business had been hemorrhaging money, making it irresponsible to make any big acquisitions. Now off the back of streaming, the business is finally creeping back up. Sony’s big play on Tuesday is a promising sign for the health of the whole industry.