EMI: Soon, it will just be two staplers and the Robbie Williams back catalogue

Perhaps the real motivation for EMI quitting the IFPI is that - if really does throw two thousand staff and "thousands" of artists off its books this coming Tuesday, as The Sunday Times claims is likely, it's not really going to be much part of the phonographic industry any more.

David Hepworth considers the plight of EMI with a degree of sympathy over on And Another Thing...:

Maybe Guy Hands has decided that he no longer needs the structure of a large record company. Maybe he's going to contract out all the record company services - from those things that are mission critical to the "fruit and flowers" - to independents and just put his energies into the one function of the record company that he really knows all about. That's banking.

But the problem for Hands then is who do you lend your money to? Robbie Williams who's sulking in his tent and whose days as a recording artist are probably behind him? Radiohead, who give the impression of slowly turning into the Grateful Dead, and are probably not going to sell any more records than they do at present? Not Paul McCartney. He's got more than you.

You could always invest in untried talent. Now just imagine this for a second. You tear off a cheque totalling a fifth of this year's development money on a kid who is to all intents and purposes off the street in the hope that one of those demos that the a&r man comes and plays so loud in your office could in a year's time turn out to be Robbie Williams's "Angels".

I don't know if I'd have the nerve. Imagine it were your money. It's the longest long shot available in any kind of business anywhere. You get no security. You have nothing you can sell on. You cannot even promise that the product will be ready in time. Or on budget. You cannot even promise that there will be a product of any kind.

The air is thick with artists talking about how clueless the record companies are. Let's see them putting their money where their mouth is and not only financing their own recordings but also taking the next step and signing up the next generation. Of course, they won't. In the history of the music business no artist has ever used their own money to sign up another artist. Why not? Because in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred you may as well go and draw £250,000 out of the bank and set light to it in the street. That's the economics of the record business. And if the traditional record companies are losing their stomach for it, who else has the nerve? I don't see anyone.

Which is a fair point, although as far as being sympathetic to EMI goes, it's the sort of sympathy that a vet shows as he slaps the haunches of a horse he's about to put to sleep.

The trouble is that the banking aspect of the record industry has been based on a bit of a lie - that the big companies know what the people really want. But they haven't, really; they've been able to thrive when they were able to control the outlets for music, with a few radio stations in thrall to their pluggers; stores desperate for discounts; charts that leaned in the major's favours; magazines happy to get the spare seat on the tour bus. The reason why people are less interested in the charts these days is less because the charts have less interest in them themselves; it's just that there's plenty of other places to go and find other things. Offices which once would have been full of typewriters clacking along to Simon Bates are now packed with PCs and people sporting earbuds; if you want to buy a new CD now, you're more likely to be looking at the store of the worlds that is Amazon than trying to find something in the Woolworths racks. The record companies could only work as banks effectively when they were able to ensure there was little competition for their product - and even then, they were bloody poor at making hits.

Now they can't even control the market, the hit-and-more-miss nature of their talent for guessing what will stick is becoming ever more exposed.