Die EMI, die

21 January 2008

Of course, the title actually means ‘The EMI, the’. It’s in German.

As a self-titled ‘industry watcher’ the slow but inevitable death of EMI brings up a whole host of conflicting emotions. First and foremost – obviously – is that this is a fundamentally bad thing to happen for the industry as a whole; it causes instability (in an industry that causes enough of that day-to-day) and the laying off of thousands of people is never a good thing. I know people at EMI, and the whole situation is a horrible one to be in.

But… in the long term, looking at the bigger picture maybe this is a good thing. The world, and the music industry, does not need either record companies or businesses as a whole that do business like EMI has been doing recently. Huge upfront advances to artists is not doing anyone, other then the artist, any favours what so ever. Similarly, the scatter-gun approach to signings could do with dying a death – where even small bands, that obviously aren’t going to sell a massive quantity (not that that should be an issue), get put through the same marketing wringer as Coldplay.

We are talking a death, here – make no mistake, EMI now seem to be on a course that has no future. It’ll take a while, but they’re done. This is not the infamous Guy Hands’ fault either; he bought a company practically run into the ground. Now, he should have been able to see that but the damage was done before he got there. While it’s not his fault, however, he certainly isn’t going to be able to correct things: he does not know how to run a record label, and running a record label is not the same as running a chain of hotels or a betting shop.

The apparent strategy that he’s laid out is to focus on A&R, cut marketing budgets and to look into alternative revenue streams such as corporate sponsorship. All of this looks like in makes some kind of sense on the surface, but dig in and you find a world of problems. First off: a focus on A&R is fine on paper, but who on earth is going to sign to EMI in its current state? You’d either have to be seriously deluded or EMI are going to have to start seriously out-bidding other labels, which just exasperates all of their problems.

So, assuming that because of the focus on (expensive) A&R they’re cutting marketing budgets which in this day and age makes a lot of sense; marketing can be a lot more effective on a smaller budget these days thanks to the rise of the internet and consequently many new ways of directly communicating with consumers. But does EMI actually know how to do any of this? I know they have some clever people working there but is that enough to turn their marketing juggernaut around? I can’t see it happening; instead they’ll just do the same as what they do now, just less of it. As a supplemental point, how exactly do the expect to shift records without telling people about them?

Finally, the talk of things like corporate sponsorship are interesting and a quite legitimate way of working (look at things like rcrdlbl.com) and out of all the things they’ve been talking about this is the one that sounds most interesting (to me, at least). However, this is not the right time to be talking about anything with the word ‘corporate’ in; EMI have already pushed themselves further away from their artists and their ethos, bringing in concepts like corporate sponsorship now is just exceptionally bad artist relations management.