A TALE OF THREE LABELS
Wind-Up, Tommy Boy and Beyond are looking for a few good suitors who'd like to invest in their labels. Strauss Zelnick, flush with Nippon Columbia yen and reportedly window-shopping for some smaller companies to make his U.S. music play, is high on everybody's list.
Alan Meltzer's Wind-Up, distributed in the U.S. by BMG until March 2002, is looking to sell a piece of its action and take some chips off the table. The label includes multi-Platinum seller Creed, whose next album is slated for release on Nov. 20. The band's international deal with Sony comes up at year's end, so it is willing to listen to all comers for a possible worldwide deal.
Only trouble is, even with a new band, Drowning Pool, happening at Active Rock radio, Wind-Up has grossly over-inflated the value of the company. And therefore, don't expect them to make a deal in the immediate future.
Meanwhile, Tommy Boy's Tommy Silverman is reportedly looking for a partner to buy back the 50% of the company owned by AOLTW. In Silverman's last re-negotiation with Warner Bros., then-WMG bosses Bob Daly & Terry Semel included a formula by which he could eventually buy back the half of the company they owned—a price that continues to plummet, since the label's hit a dry spell since that deal was struck.
Does Silverman still have enough motivation to convince a new partner to buy out AOLTW's interest? The money would have to come from another record label since Wall Street is currently none too bullish on the music biz.
Meanwhile, Allen Kovac's Beyond label, which just switched its distribution from BMG to UMVD, is also on the prowl for a white knight to give it a much-needed cash infusion. The label's much-ballyhooed Go-Go's reunion album has sold a disappointing 50k so far OTC and has failed to live up to expectations. It's been awhile since Kovac's had a hit record attached to his name.
