Sony Music CEO Doug Morris Is Streaming Big

[Outcast]

...This is the music business, so people tend to gush about their peers, especially those in positions of power, but Morris’s career is unusually impressive. He started out in the days of so-called girl groups like the Chiffons. Now he’s putting out records by Sony chart-toppers such as Adele and One Direction. He enjoyed soaring profits with the compact disc in the 1980s only to struggle over the last decade as Internet piracy decimated the big record labels.

Now Morris says the profits are returning and the thrill is back. “The industry is transitioning itself into something that will be very valuable, unless we screw it up,” he says. “There’s big money coming in from videos. Huge money. There’s a transition from ownership to access personified by something like Spotify. We’re making a lot of money from this explosion in Internet radio, the Pandoras (P) of the world. You can see Apple (AAPL) getting ready to get into it.” What’s more, the cost of distributing digital music is lower than CDs or vinyl albums. “It’s a better business,” Morris says. “The margins are higher.”...

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