The Making of a Music Multinational: PolyGram's International Businesses, 1945–1998

Gerben Bakker

Business History Review, 2006, vol. 80, issue 1, 81-123

Abstract: In half a century PolyGram expanded from two small Dutch and German companies to become the world's largest music multinational. It did so in the midst of a fast-changing business environment, in which relatively homogenous products and tastes gave way to differentiated outputs for segmented markets. Making use of strengths inherited from its owners Philips and Siemens, PolyGram integrated a continuous series of foreign acquisitions into one international organization while maintaining the creative identities and independence of the firms it acquired. To control and manage the resulting idiosyncratic configuration, it developed the federated form, a decentralized organizational structure that fit the shifting environment. PolyGram became what can be defined as a rightsbased multinational, and its structure showed similarities to multinationals in other rights-based industries.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:buhirw:v:80:y:2006:i:01:p:81-123_08

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Business History Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().