Bertelsmann, which owns half of the Sony BMG music group, will buy out the 25% of its stock that is owned by Albert Frere and expects to sell BMG Music Publishing to help fund the deal. The privately held company wanted to avoid seeing Frere publicly list that share of the company it did not own.

The company will borrow the money to buy back the shares at a price of $5.75 billion, and it stated the loan would be pain off over 12 to 18 months with cash from operations and also the "expected proceeds from the divestiture of BMG Music Publishing."

One estimate of the sale price of its publishing unit, which has 12.5% of the global market, puts its value at $1.5 billion euros. Bertelsmann will start lining up bidders in June. Vivendi's CEO is on the record as saying his company is interested in a "significant set" of music publishing assets.