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Burbank has to step up its game. Beginning in 2018, the music industry behemoth Warner Music Group will relocate from its current dull corporate digs in Burbank, and relocate to the apparently more interesting space in the Arts District, reports the Los Angeles Business Journal.
WMG will be moving into one of Los Angeles' old Ford car factory buildings. The building currently stands mid-way through a conversion to 'creative office space' at the intersection of of 7th Street and Santa Fe Avenue. While there was talk for a while that BuzzFeed might move its offices to the old building, those plans never materialized. (May we suggest Burbank?)
The Ford Factory was purchased for $37 million in 2014 by the San Francisco based Shorenstein Company, according to Urbanize.la. WMG expects to spend roughly $40 or $50 million renovating the facility for its own use, compounding a $10 million annual lease paid to Shorenstein. The Business Journal reports that WMG will enter a 13-year lease in August 2017.
Billboard first broke the news on Friday after they obtained an internal memo from WMG Chief Executive Stephen Cooper. In that memo, Cooper referred to the downtown Arts District as a neighborhood with "a burgeoning art, fashion, and food scene that's a magnet for businesses, entrepreneurs, and creatives."
The Arts District is also the site of a building 1/4 of a mile long, a sweet new bridge, and two proposed 58 story skyscrapers. We're sure the burgeoning art, fashion and food scene is just as it was in 2004, when only SCI-ARC was in the neighborhood.
BTW, if you're interested in the history of car manufacturing in Los Angeles (there used to be lots), here's an L.A. Times article from 1992 about the shuttering of the G.M. manufacturing plant in Van Nuys.
