Warner Music Group Files for IPO, It Is to Go Public in 2020

American multinational entertainment and record label, Warner Music Group, has announced that it has filed a registration statement for an IPO to sell shares of its common stock which are proposed to be sold by certain of Warner Music Group’s stockholders.

Warner Music Group became the latest big-name company to opt for a public listing since the turn of the year. The number of common stock shares that will be offered and the pricing levels for the said offering are yet to be specified, although a place-holder amount of up to $100 million was set.

The record label, which is headquartered in Los Angeles, USA, is one of the top companies in the global music industry. Precisely the third-largest company in the global music industry, following Universal Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group currently serves as the home of some of the most famous music celebrities in the world at the moment. Among these stars, we can mention Cardi B, David Guetta, Wiz Khalifa, Jason Derulo, Ed Sheeran, Pitbull, Kylie Minogue, Camilo Cabello, Madonna, Bruno Mars, and many others.

Initially a public company under previous owners, Warner Music Group went private when billionaire, Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries purchased the company for the sum of $3.3 billion in 2011. Former chairman-CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. alongside his partners acquired the company from Time Warner in 2004 for $2.6 billion and later took it public in 2005.

Contrary to other prominent listings in the near past, Warner is profitable and revealed net income attributable to the company of $256 million in 2019, against the $307 million reported a year earlier.

The motivation behind this move is easy to spot: the world’s largest music company, Universal Music Group, was recently valued at $33 billion, courtesy of its agreement to sell 10% of itself to a firm led by Chinese technology giant Tencent. With the worths of music companies leaping massively at that rate over the past few years, Blavatnik joined the train and also decided the time is ripe to go public.

Warner Music is far not the only company to go for an IPO this year. In a similar development, San Francisco-based financial technology company, Fundbox is also gearing up to conduct an IPO in the future and it has already created a position of a CFO in its corporate structure, as per reports that surfaced on January 15, 2020.

Moreover, there are talks that even Ripple may soon go public.

Meanwhile, in a report covered by Coinspeaker on September 13, 2019, Jeff Bronikowski, Head of Innovation at Warner Music Group, mentioned that Warner Music is always looking for new opportunities for musicians and has committed itself to explore emerging technologies to enable these.