As its takeover of half of EMI is being reviewed by regulators in the United States and Europe, the Universal Music Group has hired one of EMI's top record executives for its country division.
In 1989 Jackson became the first artist signed to the country division of Arista Records, and he released his debut album, Here in the Real World, that same year.
After dropping out of high school to play with country stars like Faron Young and Ernest Tubb, Mr. Reed, then only 16, was introduced to the Atlanta music publisher Bill Lowery, who helped him secure a writing and recording contract with the country division of Capitol Records.
Najoh Tita-Reid VP and country division head for the UK, Bayer Consumer Care Seen as being among the very best strategic players in her business, and tipped to be soon running a major pharmaceutical company.
But it wasn't until 1972, when the legendary producer Jerry Wexler signed him as the anchor for a country division of Atlantic Records, that someone encouraged his idiosyncratic, genre-bending sounds in the studio.
Rather than treating the big-beat incursion of Mr. Presley and Mr. Perkins as a threat, Mr. Nelson, then the head of the country division of Capitol Records, saw it as an opportunity to take rural music in a more sophisticated direction.
GW: That was a song I recorded a few years back for a label and they shut down their country division so it was impossible to get it or for it to go anywhere.
A few years ago I was working on archival research for a film about Johnny Cash and he freely gave of his time to speak with me and share his own prodigious memories of signing Cash in the 1980s to Mercury Records where he headed up the country division, sparking a career revival for the music legend.
When record labels restructure and consolidate, there is massive bloodshed at the rock and pop labels while the country divisions are generally left alone.
That would further entrench the bitter divisions between the two parts of the country, divisions that some argue have now made Thailand virtually ungovernable.But if Ms Yingluck can make it through to next year, she knows that she has a good chance of winning a fresh mandate at the polls.
