Er, excuse me for blurting out my first reaction but have you lost your mind? An Apple takeover of Vivendi Universal Music will inevitably be a disaster. Much as I love the cat-among-the-pigeons potential of a tech counter-strike deep in the heart of showbiz-land, we now have decades of evidence that mega-mergers like this one almost always destroy value (and sometimes wipe out the merging businesses).
Here’s an idea: resist the mechanical logic of a merger – “we got a platform, they got content” – the kind of logic that produced AOL/Time Warner. Leave Vivendi Universal to dispose of its music division to some old school media mug and spend that cash pile on technology, design and marketing – stuff that will more directly produce high margin sales which is what a 2% market share luxury goods player like Apple needs most. Thanks to Jack Schofield at Online Blog for the the link.