Sony Music Group

About Sony Music Group

Sony Music Group (SMG) is the part of the Sony group that runs its music business outside Japan, holding the record company Sony Music Entertainment and the publisher Sony Music Publishing, then still called Sony/ATV, under one chairman.^[1][2] Sony's president and chief executive Kenichiro Yoshida told staff on 17 July 2019 that the two businesses would come together as a new Sony Music Group effective 1 August, with Rob Stringer, chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment, taking the chair of the group in addition to that job, and Sony/ATV's chairman Jon Platt reporting to him.^[2][3] It is a subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation, has its headquarters at 25 Madison Avenue in New York City and an office in Culver City, California, and is counted among the "Big Three" music companies.^[1]

The two companies under it keep their own histories. Sony Music Entertainment is the record company Sony has owned since it bought CBS Records Inc. in January 1988; Sony Music Publishing was Sony/ATV Music Publishing, a 50-50 joint venture of 1995 between Sony and Michael Jackson that became wholly owned in September 2016, and it took its present name in January 2021, by which time it also held EMI Music Publishing, whose remaining equity Sony bought in November 2018.^[4][5] Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc. was kept outside the new group and continues to report to Sony's chief executive in Tokyo, which is why the group's remit stops at Japan; Yoshida's memo asked the two sides to go on working together "in the spirit of One Sony".^[2][3] Sony Group Corporation's Form 20-F for the year ended 31 March 2026 describes a Music segment covering Recorded Music, Music Publishing and Visual Media & Platform, reports it through Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Music Publishing and their Japanese counterpart, and lists Sony Music Entertainment and Sony Music Publishing LLC separately in its table of significant subsidiaries, each owned directly or indirectly at 100.0 per cent in the U.S.A.; it names Sony Music Group itself in the business narrative, for the partnership with GIC Private Limited that followed the Pink Floyd and Queen catalogue deals.^[4] The encyclopedia gives sonymusic.com, the site of Sony Music Entertainment, as the group's website, and Wikidata carries it as Q121433363.^[1][6]