I.B. tease

BORIS' BLUES: Len Blavatnik’s Warner Music faces a long uphill climb this year following its struggles in 2013. WMG’s frontline share declined precipitously to 11% from 13.2, a telling statistic in that it illustrates what happens when a record company stops spending money on A&R—a classic mistake made time and again by music-business neophytes as previously occurred at EMI during the Terra Firma years, BMG pre-merger and Sony BMG under Rolf Schmidt-Holtz. Indeed, an in-depth profile of Blavatnik in the current issue of The New Yorker (preview here) intimates that he views music as another commodity, like aluminum and oil, on which he made his fortune. (The piece also quotes Edgar Bronfman Jr. as saying Lyor Cohen “threw [him] under the bus.”) So notes our own I.B. Bad in his latest missive, which will appear on this site in its entirety on Friday. (1/15p)