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Ed Sheeran's label owner set for stock market windfall | |
(32 minutes later) | |
Warner Music Group, home to a host of stars including Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars, plans to sell shares in the US. | Warner Music Group, home to a host of stars including Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars, plans to sell shares in the US. |
Billionaire Sir Len Blavatnik bought the company for $3.3bn (£2.5bn) in 2011, when the industry was in the depths of a multi-year slump. | |
He looks set for a major windfall as music sales have jumped in recent years. | He looks set for a major windfall as music sales have jumped in recent years. |
The growth in demand has been helped by the rapid rise of paid streaming services such as Spotify and Apple. | |
This has boosted the value of music companies, attracting more investors back to the record industry. | |
Last year rival Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, was valued at more than $33bn after media group Vivendi sold a minority share of it to a group led by China's Tencent. | |
In contrast to other recent high-profile stock market listings, Warner Music is profitable, reporting net income last year of $256m. | |
Warner Music includes some of the world's biggest record labels including Atlantic, Warner, and Parlophone. | |
The company also owns Warner Chappell, a music publishing business. While recorded music makes up the vast majority of Warner Music's income, music publishing is a more profitable and stable business. | |
Ukraine-born Mr Blavatnik now has joint UK-US citizenship and received a knighthood in 2017 for services to philanthropy. He has a net worth of more than $25bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. |