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The Air Music and Media Group business was founded in December 1995 when the group set up its record label ‘Going For A Song’ and began trading with many wholesalers and retailers throughout the UK and Europe. The group now has over 200 employees working from offices based in Hertfordshire, Essex and Lancashire in England and Ontario in Canada. The sales team is multi lingual collectively speaking nine different languages and servicing over 55 territories around the world.
The group's core activities are the development and acquisition of music and film copyrights, the licensing of third party music and film copyrights and the exploitation of those rights through the production and sale of audio compact discs and DVD films. The group now is also responsible for the merchandising and racking of many retail outlets throughout the UK.
The content of the group’s products is diverse and covers a wide spectrum of music and film genres, chosen for their familiarity or the established reputation of the artists or actors. Collectively the group’s music products could be described as middle of the road or easy listening comprising of music by well-known artists or compilations such as 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s music, rock ’n’ roll, country, jazz, blues, ambient and world music. The group’s films, typically made early on in the stars’ careers, cover a variety of genres including martial arts, science fiction, drama, comedy, kids, action, thriller, horror and gangster all featuring major Hollywood stars. Michael Infante, commercial & marketing director of the Air Music and Media Group, says: “Our products are what we call evergreens. Our typical customers are 25 to 60 year olds, a very large area of supply plus they’ve got the disposable income.”
In October 2004 Air orchestrated a reverse takeover of Redworth Ltd trading as Music Box Leisure, a company that specialises in the racking and merchandising of supermarkets, home leisure stores, airports, ferries and other retail outlets with a mixture home entertainment software, such as CD, DVD and computer games, here in the UK. Michael explains: “The benefit of that acquisition is one of vertical integration. Typically a Music Box type operation would have been a typical customer of ours and we as such have had very little representation direct at retail. Music Box as a distributor and merchandiser physically racks the product into the retail market and therefore it gives us an opportunity to sell more of the group owned copyrights through Music Box direct to retail. They are not a competitor, so this wasn’t a cost saving exercise, this was purely for purposes of integration. This was us as a company expanding our customer base through acquisition.”
He continues: “We intend to be a one stop shop for music and movie and even computer game entertainment media. We have to broaden our offering very much from our original core business of being a budget supplier. With the acquisition of Music Box who already distributes third party products this will lead us into licensing some of those goods and then obviously broadening our offering.
The only way is up as they say so we would look now to broaden our offerings into the mid price sector.”
The group has made several acquisitions over recent years. It expanded its operations in October 2001 with the acquisition of Legacy Entertainment, a Canadian-based corporation whose operations mirror that of Going For A Song. December 2002 saw the acquisition of Hollywood DVD, a UK based producer of low priced DVDs, and then in October 2003 the group successfully acquired The Original Record Company trading as Newsound Ltd consolidating its position in the low price CD market in the UK and international markets. Michael comments: “We’ve been very acquisitive over the last three years. Growth through acquisition has proved good for us and you never know what we might have on the table even as we speak! Our plans for the future are growth by acquisition, growth by copyright acquisition and taking an aggressive stance within the market place both UK and international.”
Michael concludes: “One point that sets us apart is our excellence in service. We’ve always bent over backwards to look after our customers. With all customers price is very important but it’s not always the 100 per cent demanding factor. Integrity of distribution, and insuring the customers get their goods without damage are also important. People can contact us 24 hours a day, when London sleeps Toronto is on call. We are very aggressive as we like our sales representatives to always be contactable by their customers.
“Our aggressive pricing is a second major point. Also our eye is very much on the ball, moving with the market place rather than being a staid entertainment supplier. We have demonstrated our ability to change as the market place requirements are changing. We are as copyright owners now looking at various deals with ringtones and also music downloading with the various legitimate sites. We would hope to be progressing in that area because there will be a significant market for these products and we’ll be in a position to offer these through various new routes to market.” VTR
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