Despite a general malaise hovering of the record industry powerful label veteran Doug Morris predicts that his Universal Music Group will have a banner year in 2007.
"I think that next year we’re going to have our best year,"Morris said
at the Reuters Media Summit in New York. "I think our revenues and our
profits will be the best we’ve
ever had." He believes Universal Music will benefit from new albums by Eminem, 50 Cent and two albums from Mariah Carey.
"You
can see there are myriad streams of income starting to come into the
record companies," said Morris. "We’re going to make money from
MySpace, we’re going to
make money from YouTube, we’re going to make
money from Zune…we will make tremendous amount of money from
telephones."
Is this hype for investors or does Morris really believe that a few recycled superstars and money from new technologies and new media will replace revenue lost to file sharing and disinterest?
Read more from Morris’ interview at the Reuters Media Summit and grab some audio here. Other highlights include settling Universal’s MySpace lawsuit and asking Apple for a royalty on every iPod.
