Universal Music Group 
Polygram Entertainment 
Sir Lucian Grainge, chairman/CEO of Universal Music Group, has written a letter to staffers about the firestorm — if you'll pardon the term — that has resulted from the New York Times' investigative news story about the fire that destroyed much of the company's archive of master recordings in 2008.While Grainge emphasizes that digital copies exist of most of the destroyed tapes, he uses language that owns up to the extent of the loss to a greater degree than the...
Universal Music Group
Lucian
Grainge
Chairman / CEO
The bounty from Universal Music’s historic 2021 public offering enabled numerous growth opportunities for the market leader in 2022, including the launch of Virgin Music Group as a global label-services hub for both independent artists and labels, a play fortified by the acquisition of mTheory, along with the relaunch of Mercury through Republic Records. UMG became the first record company to enter a licensing deal with Meta, enabling its artists to receive a portion from licensed music used on Facebook creators’ posts, and in another creator-friendly move, it launched a program for legacy artists who hadn’t received royalties since 2000 to at last begin collecting on those works. Grainge’s empire also fortified its global reach by rolling out new labels in India, China, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as African imprint Blue Note Africa.
