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Bronfman quits Warner Music

by Brennen Wysong | Published December 5, 2011 at 7:20 PM

The exit announcement expected from Warner Music Group Corp. chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr. went out internally Monday, Dec. 5, just days before it's likely to be disseminated externally along with the music company's fiscal-year results on Dec. 8.

In a memo to the music company's staff, as first reported by Variety, Bronfman, 56, noted that other obligations were "beginning to take an inordinate amount of time." Among his extracurricular roles are chairman of Endeavor Global Inc., which seeks to boost emerging markets by supporting high-impact entrepreneurs; general partner at Accretive LLC, a venture capital firm specializing in outsourcing; and executive chairman of Global Thermostat, a clean-air initiative.

Bronfman, who'll remain a company director but whose resignation has been anticipated since the sale of EMI Group Ltd. in November, engineered the $3.3 billion sale of WMG to Access Industries Holdings LLC in July. He then stayed on to advise Access' founder, billionaire Len Blavatnik, on how and if the industrial group should proceed with EMI.

WMG was once favored to capture EMI's recorded-music division but lost out to Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group -- the industry leader whose £1.2 billion ($1.9 billion) bid landed it a definitive agreement. Meanwhile, EMI's music-publishing division was picked up by a Sony Corp.-led coalition for $2.2 billion.

Bronfman's retirement, to take effect on Jan. 31, 2012, will be his second from a business he entered as a songwriter in 1973, right after high school, and returned to as a leader in 1995 by having family-controlled Seagram Co. Ltd. buy 80% of MCA Inc. A Bronfman-run Seagram doubled down in music by purchasing Dutch entertainment-conglomerate Polygram NV in 1998, thereby establishing the world's largest musical entity under the new name of Universal Music Group.

Another transforming deal occurred in 2000 with the merger of UMG, as part of parent company Seagram, into Vivendi Universal SA. A year after that, in response to unchecked spending by Vivendi Universal chairman and CEO Jean-Marie Messier, Bronfman resigned as an executive officer of the combined company.

He reappeared in 2004 as chairman and chief executive of WMG, after successfully purchasing Time Warner Inc.'s music division with some private equity investors for $2.6 billion. Blavatnik, who joined WMG's board the same year Bronfman began to run it, credited "his vision in transforming WMG into a progressive, modern music company that made WMG so attractive to Access. Given that vision and his years of expertise in the industry, as a director at WMG, he will continue to be an important part of our leadership."

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