History
The company was set up in 1977 when Lloyd Webber, frustrated with the terms of his contract with the impresario Robert Stigwood, decided to take greater control over the management of his creative works. All Lloyd Webber compositions and productions created from that point have been owned by the company.
The Really Useful Group was floated on the stock market in 1986. Four years later, Lloyd Webber took it back into private ownership, selling 30% to film and music group PolyGram to fund the cost of buying back shares. In 1995, PolyGram was bought by Canadian conglomerate Seagram, with the Really Useful stake being passed to its own film and music subsidiary, Universal. In 1999, Lloyd Webber paid $75m for Universal's 30% stake, giving the Really Useful Group 100% ownership of all the composer's works.
Read more about this topic: Really Useful Group
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
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—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)