Warner Music Group

Warner Music Group Corp. has set the ball in motion for a potential sale of the company, even as it weighs a bid to buy rival EMI Music. Warner Music has retained Goldman Sachs to vet a bid from private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and potentially others, according to sources at one of the companies. KKR had approached Warner late last year about a potential deal. Shares in Warner Music shot up $1.29, or 27.3%, to $6.01 as speculation of a sale overshadowed news that the New York company's chairman and chief executive, Edgar Bronfman Jr., was convicted Friday in French court of insider trading while he was vice chairman of Vivendi in 2002.

Shares of Warner Music Group surged nearly 23 percent Friday on news that the world's No. 3 music company is up for sale. Warner Music has hired Goldman Sachs as an advisor to help with the process, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday. ID:nN20176555. Private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts reportedly approached Warner Music's management to express interest in acquiring the company. The company is home to recording legends such as Ray Charles, Fleetwood Mac and the Bee Gees and to current stars like Green Day and Death Cab for Cutie.

Warner Music Group hears sweet music in MTV's online advertising network. The music conglomerate on Wednesday announced a multiyear, nonexclusive deal to let MTV sell ads for thousands of Warner's online music videos. The music video business, which MTV pioneered three decades ago but has largely abandoned, has migrated online in recent years to sites such as YouTube and artists' individual home pages. The dispersion, however, has meant that artists and labels have collected very little advertising revenue from the videos they create because the clips have been spread far and wide across the Internet.

Warner Music Group, in a sign that the struggling recorded music company is seeking to bolster its ranks of artists, has tapped producer Rob Cavallo for the newly created position of chief creative officer. In that role he will help develop acts across all of the Warner music labels including Atlantic, Asylum, Electra and Warner Bros. Cavallo, a multiple Grammy winner, has a strong track record with credits that include Green Day's "American Idiot," Kid Rock's "Rock N Roll Jesus" and most recently the top-10 release "Brand New Eyes" from the rock band Paramore.

Music videos from Green Day, Jay-Z and Linkin Park will begin reappearing on YouTube as soon as December, the result of a multiyear agreement reached with Warner Music Group Corp. The Internet's dominant video site and one of the world's largest music companies had been locked in a dispute over the value of music videos, some of the most popular content on YouTube, whose young viewers are coveted by advertisers. Licensing talks reached an impasse late last year, resulting in Warner's videos being pulled from the site.

Warner Music Group Corp. reported online sales growth slowed, losses widened and that it wrote down investments in Internet start-ups Imeem.com and Lala.com. Warner's losses widened in the quarter to $68 million, or 45 cents a share. A year earlier, the company's losses totaled $37 million, or 25 cents. Excluding one-time charges, the loss of 23 cents a share narrowly beat analysts' forecasts of a 25-cent loss, according to Thomson Reuters. Overall revenue fell 17% to $668 million during the quarter.

Metallica was in Austin last week for a not-so-secret show at the South by Southwest music festival designed to promote a new edition of the video game Guitar Hero, due out this month. But the band's drummer, Lars Ulrich, took the opportunity to talk about issues facing the group, including its relationship with its longtime label Warner Music Group and the proposed Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger. Metallica's 2008 release "Death Magnetic" was the last the group contractually owed to Warner, and Ulrich said he's ready to consult with another famously anti-corporate artist, Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, about surviving outside the major-label system.