Long-time Warner Music Group head Edgar Bronfman Jr., who stepped down as chief executive of the record label earlier this year, will also relinquish the chairman’s role on Jan. 31.

Bronfman, 56, will remain on the board of the world’s third-largest music company, which was sold to Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries for $3.3 billion in May.

In a memo to staff yesterday, Bronfman said his other duties are taking up so much time that he needed to give up the chairman title. Warner didn’t name a replacement chairman.

With private-equity backing, Bronfman led the 2004 buyout of Warner Music from Time Warner for $2.6 billion, and later helped broker the label’s sale to Access Industries. He ceded the CEO role shortly after the sale was completed.

Bronfman didn’t get to see his long-held dream of merging Warner with rival EMI, which will be broken up and sold to Universal Music Group and Sony Corp.