Stephen Swid

The 21 Club, where the elite have met to eat since Prohibition, has been sold to two businessmen for a "nice, round" $21 million, but former owner Jerry Berns said business at the iron-gated restaurant will continue as usual. Berns and his partners, H. Peter and Florence Kriendler, transferred their shares Wednesday to Marshall Cogan and Stephen Swid, longtime patrons.

CBS has signed a letter of intent to sell CBS Songs to a group including New York businessman Stephen Swid, two industry sources told The Times. Competing bidders for the music publishing unit included its current president, Michael Stewart, who last month was believed to have reached a deal. Neither Stewart nor his attorney could be reached for comment. Swid, best known as a large shareholder of General Felt Industries Inc., last year purchased the New York's elite 21 Club with a partner.

Music: In its biggest coup since being purchased in 1992 by a group of investors, the small royalty-collection organization SESAC has signed agreements covering the repertoires of songwriters Bob Dylan and Neil Diamond. The nonprofit American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) formerly collected and paid royalties for Dylan and Diamond. Terms of the multimillion-dollar deals were not released. More than 300 Dylan songs, including "Blowing in the Wind" and "Mr.

Ventura Entertainment Group Ltd., a North Hollywood television and film production company, said it completed the sale of its Music Group division to a partnership formed by New York financier Stephen C. Swid for $1.3 million in cash and notes. Ventura also received a 7% stake in the partnership that bought the division. Arthur Mogull, president of the division, resigned his position with Ventura in order to become president of the new partnership.

When it comes to collecting and paying royalties for songs played everywhere from radio stations to shopping malls, the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers is so far behind its competitors that few people have even heard of it. The sleepy organization is dwarfed by the music industry's two nonprofit giants--American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers and Broadcast Music Inc., which together collect an estimated 97% of the $700 million in performance royalties annually.

In what is by far the largest acquisition in the history of the music publishing business, British entertainment conglomerate Thorn-EMI has agreed to purchase SBK Entertainment World for $340 million, The Times has learned. SBK's principal asset is a catalogue of some 250,000 song copyrights that it purchased two years ago from CBS Inc. for $125 million.

Ventura Entertainment Group Ltd., a struggling North Hollywood film and television producer, said it lost $2.8 million in the second quarter that ended Dec. 31, compared with a loss of $704,754 in the quarter that ended Jan. 31, 1990. Ventura Entertainment, which recently changed its fiscal year-end to June 30 from Oct. 31, said its revenue for the recent quarter grew by a factor of more than 13 to $1.85 million from $134,578 in the equivalent year-ago quarter. For the six months that ended Dec.

Warner Communications is on the verge of securing an agreement to buy Chappell & Co., one of the world's largest music publishers, industry sources said Monday. If completed, the deal would result in the consolidation of two of the nation's three largest music publishers. New York-based Warner is prepared to pay more than $200 million in preferred stock, or more than twice the sum paid just three years ago when an investor group acquired Chappell from Polygram, the sources said.

CBS Inc. said Thursday that it will further study the options for its records group, which has reportedly attracted a sizable purchase offer from Sony Corp. CBS said its board, which met informally for three hours to discuss the matter, would consider it further at a regularly scheduled meeting Oct. 14. Separately, CBS said it had completed the previously announced sale of its magazine group for $650 million in cash to a group led by the unit's senior management.

Spin magazine Publisher Bob Guccione Jr. hired and promoted young women based on their personal relationships with him and presided over an office where women were fondled and subjected to locker room-style comments by male editors, according to testimony in federal trial here. In the trial, now in its second week in U.S.