vivendi

Prerecorded music has been a fading industry for years, and herding struggling labels together will only make it that much easier to identify the remains. And there aren't too many people mourning major labels' passing.

Vivendi sold a nearly 7.7% stake in NBC Universal to General Electric for $2 billion, the companies announced Monday. The sale is the first phase of a previously announced $5.8 billion deal.

For many rap and hip-hop artists, behind all the trash talk and posturing, it's all about business. Forbes recently released its Hip Hop Cash Kings list, and the 20 big names on it racked up a total of about $300 million, despite the weak economy and the Internet revolution that is killing the CD business.

Susan Boyle's debut album I Dreamed A Dream is now in its sixth week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 to become 2009's No. 2 top-selling album, after Taylor Swift's Fearless. The Boyle-Swift horse race was a bittersweet victory for the music industry, which stayed in the doldrums in 2009.

The release of rapper Lil Wayne's upcoming rock album, Rebirth, was pushed back last week (for the sixth time) to February 1. But 500 lucky Amazon (AMZN) customers got the surprise stocking stuffer in the mail this week.

A splashy music-industry event in New York City on Tuesday night began, inevitably, with a speech by Bono. American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert and pop artiste Lady GaGa closed the gala out. In between, passionate testimonials from Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt and Universal Music Group CEO Doug...

Last week, British sensation Susan Boyle set the record for the highest single-sales week of 2009. This week, Boyle continued to lure consumers where they'd resisted going all year: the music aisle. I Dreamed A Dream, Boyle's debut for Sony's (SNE) Sony Music Entertainment, sold 527,000 copies in...

Comcast will take control of NBC Universal's 10 owned-and-operated stations, triggering a federal investigation, according to a source with knowledge of the deal. On Tuesday, the source says, GE (GE), the bellwether American icon that produces everything from jet engines to lightbulbs, agreed to...

In July 2007, I joined a group of journalists at the General Electric (GE) offices in Rockefeller Center to ask CFO Keith Sherin some questions. At the end of the meeting, a few executives took me aside and asked me what I thought GE should do to boost the company's perception among investors. I...

Comcast (CMCSA), the nation's largest cable company, and GE (GE), the giant industrial conglomerate, are nearing agreement on a deal that would value NBC Universal, the huge entertainment company, at around $30 billion, sources familiar with the matter tell DailyFinance. If successful, the pact...