Guy Hands slaps A&R

Having had some time to peer at the inner doings of EMI, Guy Hands has seen the role of A&R up close:

"The power and the decision has sat with the A&R man, who is someone who gets up late in the day, listens to lots of music, goes to clubs, spends his time with artists and has a knack of knowing what would sell."

So, people who live an unconventional lifestyle but, crucially, live and breathe music and understand what the people want to hear. Sounds good. Except, erm, Hands doesn't think that they're the best people to choose what records to release:

"What we are doing is taking the power away from the A&R guys and putting it with the suits - the guys who have to work out how to sell music."

So - instead of the people who understand music and know what people want, Hands is passing the power to people who don't understand music but get their sales through brute force of advertising. It does make some sort of sense - creating products which people actually need and want and value is time consuming and expensive; creating any old shit and flogging it through adverts is cheap and, of course, lucrative. It's not like Hands cares, is it? He's not going to have problems sleeping with this deal.

Oddly, though, having suggested that marketing is where the power should be seated, Hands, erm, then suggests that marketing people don't know what they're doing, either:

"You might as well have put a £50 note on the CD - it probably would have done better [than some EMI imprints' marketing]."

That sounds like the place to pour your resources into, then.

EMI might be more trouble than we'd imagined.