No Rock And Roll Fun

EMI HAVE A SPARE BILLION QUID?: So, it's looking increasingly likely that EMI will be buying up Warners, bringing a billion quid we could have sworn they didn't have and their skill at laying off staff right across the world to the label.

And as EMI-Warners starts to take shape, the might of Sony and BMG are starting to mull merging together their music concerns - if they can get it past the European Regulators (the EU is really sharp on stopping record labels merging, in case it becomes anti-competitive, like the labels don't already act as a massive price fixing cartel anyway.) Big Five the Big Three by this time next year?

Curiously, as it looks more and more certain that Warners will cease to be a stand-alone operation (or as Stand-alone as you can get in the belly of the TimeWarner beast), Madonna is getting more and more edgy about the future of Maverick, her vanity label that has managed to keep bubbling along off the back of Alanis Morrisseyette. Madonna, reckons the Mail on Sunday, wants to buy Warners out of the label - she's "afraid" that the change in ownership will give management the opportunity to shunt off the creaky loss-making concern to where labels go to die (Pye in the sky?) ("the new owners won't be interested in investing in the label in the same way").