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If the Music Business Keeps Growing, Why the Layoffs?

Media business layoffs are hitting the music industry, with more to come from Universal Music and perhaps other labels.

In March, WMG’s new CEO, Robert Kyncl, a former YouTube executive, laid off around 270 people — 4% of the company’s workforce — to focus more on technology initiatives and “new skills for artist and songwriter development,” as he wrote in a memo to staff at the time. UMG’s next focus, chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge wrote in a memo to staff in early January, will be “creating the blueprint for the labels of the future” by building the technology to do more work in-house, expanding in developing markets and finding ways to better monetize superfans. BMG’s staffing changes were spurred by new CEO Thomas Coesfeld as a response to an international marketing structure that didn’t meet expectations and duplicated the efforts of local teams, he wrote in a memo to staff.

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