Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

They only did it ‘cos of fame - EMI

As I mentioned in my earlier post, EMI are getting rid of an awful lot of staff and several of their artists are getting a bit upset, claiming that they don’t know if they will get properly promoted. Radiohead and Macca have already left the label and now the likes of Kylie Mingogue and Coldplay are making similar noises. Robbie Williams is the one that is making me laugh though - his manager, Tim Clarke, was recently quoted as saying

“The question is, ‘Should Robbie deliver the new album he is due to release to EMI? We have to say the answer is ‘No’. We have no idea how EMI will market and promote the album.”

Well they do have a point, over a million copies of his last opus, ‘Rudebox’ are going to be crushed to pave Chinese roads so maybe the new promotional tool will be to have his new release pave the runway at Dubai’s new Al Maktoum International Airport?

I don’t know who to dispair of the most here. On one hand we have Robbie and his cronies who, having signed one of the most lucrative record deals ever, are now riding their luck after the commercial disaster that was Rudebox. On the other, we have EMI, blaming their misfortunes on piracy, not the fact that they managed to sign themselves around 14000 artists, over 85% of whom do not make money!!

I have written before about the fallacy of EMI’s piracy arguement, but you have to feel sorry for them as the smaller artists on the EMI roster as they will almost all be on these restrictive contracts that mean they cannot do anything that EMI do not want them to do, but will not have budget to do anything. With new business models like TuneCore coming out and the financial success of Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’, most artists are not going to want a deal, they will be far better off doing their own thing and not getting left to rot on the roster of one of the industry’s big guns.