David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…I did. I looked this up because I wanted to bust this out for you and be like, did you know that Sony Music and Sony Pictures were reuniting the original Columbia? Then as I was digging into it, I was like, wait a minute, these companies, Columbia Pictures and CBS where the C stands for Columbia, shows the word Columbia completely independently. That is not true. They did not stem from the same company. They are completely different, and yet Sony ended up buying both of them in the future. Unbelievable. They didn't reunite the Colombias. They united the Colombias for the first time. Back to 1966, CBS is newly interested in Japan. They're looking for a partner to set up a JV to access the Japanese recorded music market. Morita hears about this and hears that a CBS executive named Harvey Schein is over to handle this matter for CBS. He meets him and he says, I'm in. I will do everything in my power to make this happen. We want to do a 50-50 JV between CBS and Sony. We'll be super flexible on whatever terms you want and we will make this happen as fast as humanly possible. Schein is like, okay. They do. Morita is true to his word. Within a year, CBS/Sony Records is created. It's a 50-50 JV between the two companies. It goes pretty well. In fact, it goes so well, it blew my mind. I had to check this in a bunch of different places to make sure that this is accurate, but multiple sources have this. CBS/Sony Records, which is the Japanese distribution arm of CBS' recorded music in Japan, became such a cash cow that within just a few years, it is the most profitable division for both Sony and CBS. It is just a geyser of cash. This is because of the pent-up demand for the Japanese public to buy American recorded records.…

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