“From March 3 tot April 1, I will post every day ideas or thoughts about life, company or my personal trivialities”

We are living strange times in the music biz. EMI has created a total debt of about 5 billion USD, and got in the hands of Citibank. It generated a lot of comments, such as ‘The Day the music died (for EMI) is more trouble for the industry.” It’s totally unbelievable that a landmark like EMI may be gone foreever … What happened ? Well, risk averse non-digital strategy, poor debt handling but probably mostly incompetent management, who didn’t care about the music. I lived the case myself: former ‘A&R’s who’s ambition it is to talk about music and artists, but in the end are only interested in invoicing a max amount and scraping an additional percentage. But let bygone’s be bygone’s… I’l write about it another time. I must say that a lot of people at EMI are total pro’s. It seems to me that the publishing team has a better perspective that the label team, and that’s also how it will get auctioned up. I think you can get ‘EMI label’ for about 1 EURO, while EMI publishing will be faught for. Maybe the future of a label is to be publishing dependent, and maybe A&R becomes publishing driven in the future?

The normal and clear candidate for me was the merge EMI with Warner/Chappell (Chappell is the publishing arm – at SonicAngel, our publishing arm is named Glechar Music). But … Warner is now also for sale. Billboard just wrote an article that there will be 5 candidates, with bids no higher than 2 billion USD… So You can have it for about 1.5 billion USdollars.
So EMI and Warner are again in a race… Only this time to get acquired in order to survive.

To put things in perspective:
- Apple currently has a ‘war chest’ of 60 billion USD in Cash
- Facebook is valued at a massive 75 billion USD!

In other words:
Facebook is worth 50 times more than ALL of EMI …
Apple, who lead digital music sales via iTunes, could acquire both Warner and EMI, for less than 10% of their surplus cash.

Pretty crazy when you think about it. But that’s the current stade of the music industry.

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