Word: emi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Which isn't to say music executives are sitting around wringing their hands. It takes time for any corporation to recognize that its universe has changed, and major labels don't exactly turn on a dime. For Martin Bandier, chairman and CEO of EMI Music Publishing, the dime dropped three years ago when his 11-year-old son Max gave him a present: his 100 favorite Motown songs. "I said, 'But we have hundreds of copies!'" Bandier recalls. "He said, 'This is in a different place--on my hard drive.' It was scary." Bandier immediately convened a war council...
Reality bit, and deep. In 2001 EMI brought in new top management, including chairman of EMI Recorded Music Alain Levy, to help navigate the brave new digital world. The administration promptly laid off 1,800 employees (20% of EMI's staff), which helped absorb the impact when sales fell 10% in 2002--and created an executive position, global head of antipiracy. It also brought in executive vice president John Rose, an e-commerce ace from consulting firm McKinsey. "The fundamental premise of hiring someone like me," says Rose, "is that this industry needs to be re-engineered." Since last summer...
...EMI, the plan is not to prohibit copying, just to keep us from doing it quite so much. In theory, the CD of the future will be smart enough to let its owner make one copy of a song for the computer, one for the iPod, and maybe burn an extra for the car, but that's it. But even that might annoy consumers who are used to making as many copies as they want. Even if the smart CD of the future becomes a reality, to work at all it will have to work absolutely perfectly. If just...
...this may be what it has to look like, and for the business side, that's the real significance of the digital revolution. "It's not piracy per se but a transition to a digital world that will transform what a record company is and how it works," says EMI's Rose. "While downloading is an important issue, it's just symbolic of a much more fundamental shift in how music will be moved and acquired by consumers and be used...
...impossible to determine how many millions of these bargain-basement CDs wind up in China. Most music-label executives won't talk about it on the record, and no one is monitoring the traffic. (BMG in New York would not comment for this article; EMI in London and Universal in Los Angeles declined repeated interview requests.) But it's clear this amorphous gray market is entrenched. The discontinued or surplus CDs, generally known as "cutouts" in the West, are in China called dakou (saw gash) because some albums have a telltale notch in the jewel box and sometimes...