EMI: A company in crisis

Almost five years to the day after revealing Ken Barry's reward for failure was £6million, EMI's annual reports reveals that in the year in which he was forced out, Alan Levy pocketed £4.6 million quid. Oh, and they're still paying him some benefits, despite him having been kicked out in January:

The annual report says: "Mr Levy is entitled to continue to receive for one year from termination the value of retirement benefits and benefits in kind provided to him under his employment agreement."

Part of the Kilimanjaro of cash Levy shovelled into his pockets was a £1.1million bonus. Now, you might wonder how a boss being ousted after issuing a profits warning might come to qualify for such a huge bonus:

Last year's extra £1.1m bonus - when fellow executives missed out on performance-related awards - is explained to shareholders as part of his contract, which states that "in the event of his termination without cause he would be entitled to a bonus in respect of the financial year in which the termination occurred, pro-rated down to the date of his termination, with the bonus being based on the average bonus achieved in the prior three years".

Technically, Levy went "without cause" and somehow got the cash.

Now, I'm not Alan Sugar, but if you have senior executives blessed with contracts where they can screw up, give up and cash up, it doesn't exactly make them as desperate to do well as if their payment required some sort of success, does it?

When you read Paul Birch's moist-eyed picture of record labels being "forced" to lay people off, you might want to ponder how many jobs might have been saved at EMI had Levy been paid according, if not to his needs, then at least to his value.

Thank God (and everyone else in between)

Joss Stone's bid to turn herself into an American soul diva continues apace. Having noticed that their albums generally contain long, rambling thank you lists - always namechecking god - Joss has turned in a thanks list so long, rambling and embarrassing she couldn't fit it on the album liner and has had to post it online instead:

making this album has been a true growing experience for me in so many ways. in the last 4, almost 5 years, i had no choice but to grow maybe 20 years in that time. so it’s been hard work, tiring and emotionally....interesting. for some reason, i've always known that everything’s gonna be ok, no matter what happens i'm always gonna be...ok. that's my faith that keeps me there, so i do with all my heart and love, my whole everything, i thank god, whether it be a he or she i won't know til i get there but whatever it is, no matter what, i thank god so much for putting me through everything i have had to endure. i also thank him for giving me the common sense to listen and learn.

it’s been a pretty intensive course but i know all that is only is because it was meant. also i thank him for keeping me company and hearing me when i speak. what will be will be. many people are uncomfortable with this sentence. some don't like to think they’re not in control of their own fate. i believe in karma. everything comes back around, but it isn't up to any of us to decide when or what shall happen. that’s just fate. we can only be positive and know that there's always a smile lurking. u just have to catch it. Mostly, i thank him / her for giving us all the gift of being able to hear and see art. it's a beautiful thing. so thank u love!

Did she just call God "love"?

But she's just getting going... she then rolls onto thank everyone she's ever met. (Everyone else, as she does appear to have met God in some form as well.) On she goes:

wanna say a special thanks to everyone who helped me when my management disappeared without trace. i didn’t know what to do -- kinda made it up as i went along as u do but certain people really helped me so much. i was upset and mostly pretty scared about the whole thing. didn’t know what the hell i was doing. but hey, i figured it out with all of your help

We suspect the old management are probably hiding in the woods somewhere.

Most oddly, though, is when she turns her attention to the record label execs:

david munns, thanks for believing in me and sticking with me through all the crap. i’m sorry if i can be a pain sometimes or well, my situation can be, but u always help me figure it out. i appreciate that so much. thank u thank u thank u. you were definitely there when i needed you most. i know u are a busy busy man but for some reason u make the time for me. i don’t know why but i won’t question it. i just thank god for it. you’re wicked. i love how u have always treated me like an equal, even when i was 14. i was scared then but now realise u were just speaking to me straight and i love that in you. you are a real person. “no bullsh** allowed” should be stuck on your office door. i like that you’re honest and i can believe what you say. i like that you have my back in any situation. thank you for believing in me enough to give me the chance to make this record. u had no obligation to do so. thank u for having that trust in me.

alain levy, i just think you’re so lovely every time in see you. you are so sweet and always smiling, i get a positive energy from you. i’m so glad you like my music. to work with both you and david is an honour and actually if i go back like 5 years it’s something i’ve dreamt about and wished for. thank u for having me at your company. i will do the best i can for you. that’s a promise. i’m so glad u like the album and support it in the way u do. i love how you are passionate. alot of people look at you guys and see businessmen and that’s it. well maybe some are like that – ok, definitely some are but not you two. i can’t put my finger on it but, i know u care, more than care. as much as people think it’s all about the money i know that it isn’t just that with you. i hoping i’m right -- usually i can tell with these things. but i know everything happens for a reason. we are all in this together because that is what was meant. now let’s make the most out of what we're given and spread real music across the world. with your help, we can make real music with real musicians and real instruments popular again. no more bullshit! right. thanks for supporting me on that too. much love x

The BBC calculates that the list runs to seven pages of closely-typed text; putting it online means that at least it saves space. It could also allow you to remove awkward passages like, for example, lavishing praise for developing your career two months after he'd been sacked for helping run the company into the ground. In theory.

EMI: We've had a terrible Christmas

The risk of placing your faith in Robbie Williams is, well, he's slightly patchy. EMI had hoped to try and make up for a fairly rubbish 2006 by flogging loads of Williams albums in the run-up to Christmas, along with stuff from Norah Jones and Keith Urban. We know that Rudebox scuppered the Williams plans, and to be honest, if Jones and Urban released records at all, nobody told us.

So, it's no surprise that this morning that EMI have announced their festive period was somewhat glum: they managed a drop in sales. The knock-on effect? Their shares have fallen 10% this morning. And the knock on from that? Alan Levy and his deputy David Munns are out.

This isn't a side effect of piracy: this is the side effect a label who think Keith Urban is going to be a big seller for an English Christmas.

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EMI TALK-UP ITUNES PRICE RAMP

We're interested to hear that EMI are running round telling people that they reckon Apple is going to fall into line and start charging more for some tracks on iTunes:

The chief executive of EMI Music, Alain Levy, said EMI had discussed the issue with Apple CEO Steve Jobs and believed Apple planned to end its single-price policy for iTunes music, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site. "We are having discussions which make us believe it will happen in the next 12 months," Levy reportedly said at a press conference in London for the company's half-year profit results. "There is a common understanding that we will have to come to a variable pricing structure. The issue is when. There is a case for superstars to have a higher price."

We imagine this might come as a surprise to Apple, whose one-price-for-all price has been a central feature of its offering; it's possible that Levy is just trying to bounce Jobs into having to capitulate.

There is, of course, no case at all for superstars to have a higher price - you could argue, possibly, that a record which costs more to make could cost more to reflect the extra costs, but since someone who really likes Mariah is not going to get any more value out of one of her songs than someone who really like Toad The Wet Sprocket would get from one of theirs, there's no reason to expect consumers to pay more for Mariah than anyone else. Equally, there's no limit to the supply of any specific music track online, so there's no supply and demand factor which would lead to Robbie's Angels should cost more than Slowdive's Morningrise.

And although there is more spent on bringing a Madonna album to market costs more than getting a Sons And Daughters album out, the main bulk of that money is pissed away on marketing. And surely Levy doesn't want to tell consumers they have to pay more for Madonna tracks because they have to buy thirty-two sheet advertising locations across the capital, does he?

[Thanks to Michael B for the link]

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ROBBIE TO REMAIN A LOCAL BOY

EMI have made it clear that they're to give up trying to interest America in Robbie Williams. The company CEO Alain Levy has said that launching Williams in the leading entertainment market "isn't neccesary." In the same way, of course, that it's not reallty neccesary to have shoes, or drink water:

"In order to crack the U.S. market, we probably would need six months to a year to do it. It simply isn't in his schedule now. Right now I don't think it's on the cards. I don't think it's necessary."

In other words, America has been like those people who put little notices on their front door saying they don't want free newspapers, only the notice says "No Gurning Idiots Thank You".

In unrelated news, the American Embassy reports applications for residence visas have increased several thousand per cent in the last 24 hours.

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ROCKOBIT: The King who sang with "the King", Solomon King, has died.

Although best known as a backing singing for Elvis (indeed, it's a picture of Presley that the BBC are using for King's obituary - once a backing singer, always a backing singer) he also worked with Billie Holiday, the first white singer to do so. He scored hits as a solo artist with She Wears Your Ring and When We Were Young.

Born in Lexington, Kentucky as Alan Levy, King lived in Manchester for two decades with his Canadian wife, Henny Lowy. The couple raised four children before the marriage ended; King retunred to America and picked up a career singing in the clubs.

King died from cancer yesterday in his Oklahoma home.

A HEALTHY LEVY: Next time a moist-eyed music business executive tells you that its just so damn hard feeding his wife and kids with all this piracy about, you might want to cough politely and point out that somehow the supposedly stricken EMI has managed to find the cash to award its Chief Executive Alan Levy a forty-three percent payrise, bringing his annual earnings up to a million quid a year, for fear that he might go elsewhere. We're sure the guys who've been sacked by EMI this year will be delighted that all that cost-cutting has gone to ensure the company can really remain competitive. At least as far as grossly over-paying its not noticeably talented bosses are concerned, anyway. Levy was quoted in The Economist a while ago saying "Most people in the creative world think they artists themselves." Not him, obviously - imagine him trying to keep himself in cream cakes and golf clubs on the few quid they pay their main body of acts.

EMI DOUBLE-DECIMATE: EMI have announced 1500 job losses worlwide, the vast majority coming as they outsource CD production in Europe and America. At the same time, they're going to drop one in five of their artists - mainly "niche" and "underperforming" acts (but what happened to the record labels investing in bands that didn't sell very many? Wasn't that the justification for the exhorbitant cost of CDs?)

It's worth remembering that EMI is expecting to make a profit of about GBP300 million this year, and saw its share of the growing US market increase by one percent. So this isn't the actions of a company on the ropes - it's actually a simple cost-cutting at the expense of the workers move. Alan Levy, head of music at EMI, is expected to take home 20 million quid this year.

What the pop papers say: The dereliction of duty edition

Stumble... the resurgence of The Face hits a rock in its path as the new Popbitch junta in charge attempt to move away from the stuff they know about. Hence, while they could have had a gorgeous Yeah Yeah Yeahs cover, they instead lead with “Why the undead are cool” (or glamorous or something) “again.” Riding the Buffy wave about three years too late, guys. Or is this A Couple Of Days After The Living Dead?

Talking of the living dead, boys, Muzik magazine is struggling to keep its nerve in a dance magazine market that’s under more pressure than Bobby Brown’s rectum. This month, they’ve tried to recast themselves as always having had a non-dance element to their magazine, going all Uncut style with Madonna, Prince or apparently someone else on the choice of three covers. Even more dubious, the covermount which goes with the theme has got Joy Division on it. Joy Division? You sick fucks - he wasn’t dancing, he was an epileptic.

The Guardian Saturday Review made space for Philip Horne’s review of Alluding to the Poets by Christopher Ricks, a study of the poetic tradition of reheating forbear’s words, often without attribution; interesting from a music point of view both aurally and lyrically - of course, nowadays, rather than smiling and saying “ah, Ashcroft is referencing Loog Oldham there - how clever” the reaction is to send a stiffly worded solicitor’s letter. “It’s a means of lightening what Walter Jackson Bate recognised in the 1970’s as ‘the burden of the past’ which has hung over the English poet since Dryden and Pope, the sense that everything has already been all too well said” writes Horne, demonstrating that even the Manic’s most famous war cry - “we know we’re derivative, but what else can we do? Everything’s been done already” - was itself a rip-off.

The Economist is virtually a pop issue, taking time to consider both Pete Townshend and The Music Industry In General. In the first case, the ‘mist slides into the same trap as most of the other papers in confusing the facts of Pete T and Matthew Kelly’s trouble with the cops. Kelly is being investigated, but has not been charged with anything, and as such the treatment of him as a soiled, boy-buggering monster is at best contemptuous of fairness and quite possibly a contempt of court. But Townshend - also yet to be charged with anything wrong doing - has been happily admitting his law-breaking, and conducting a loud and public defence in mitigation. As such, he’s moved the courtroom out into the wider press; his admission of downloading kiddie porn and forking out cash in return makes it unlikely that he’d plead Not Guilty in court and so the question is up for consideration by a judge who - surely - are selected to be above such tittle-tattle anyway?

Happily, because it’s more about figures and the sorts of things you can do with an MBA, the economist is better on the question of why the Entertainment Industry is wobbling. It pays lip service to the download boogerman, but then turns its fire where its surely more deserved - with management eyes being so busily fixed on convergence and content and all the geegaws of the brave new world (the paper doesn’t add “fighting their own customers”, but it could), the music industry has lost sight of how to produce stuff that people actually want. It points to the slow turn in EMI under Alan Levy, who’s split the pocketbook from the soul with the new regime at Virgin Records. One guy to sign the music, one to make sure the figures add up. At least there’s a place for creativity in that set-up. What’s truly disturbing in the way the Industry is trying to build fences round its copyright past is that it suggests that that’s all it sees itself as ever having that’ll be worthwhile to work with.

So, no longer hungover, our newsagent was able to pass us an NME - an NME so light that we almost thought it was missing something. But it’s not. Datsuns on the cover.

When is that woman from the Daily Star going to turn up and do something for the news desk? At the moment she’s still being a Bitch - whose quality Private Eye points out included running as “spotted” “the queen, leaving Buckingham Palace in a car” - one step away from “Huw Edwards, reading the news - on the telly.” Still, we’re sure games will be lifted when she’s running the nme news desk. On the other hand, when its leading on the news that Noel has re-recorded Wonderwall - what were we just saying about how you start to cherish the past only when there’s not much bright in the future? - you wonder if she’ll need to bother.

Other things on the news page: What fans thought of 8Mile - um, unsurprisingly, being fans, they liked it; you can use a voucher to get cheap CDs at Virgin (this isn’t news, this is an advert, surely - and the fact that Page 41 needs a big up on page four raises the question - how far does the average reader make it through these days?); Didz from the Cooper Temple Clause got an infection when he had his appendix out; you’ll remember that last week the Home Secretary was going to impound our ears and only allow Blair-approved tracks to be listened to - there was a big spread in the nme all about it? Well, this week the cloud seems to have totally blown over - two letters in angst and a quick interview with Jay-Z (he’s asked a stupid question: ‘do you feel responsible for violent crime in the UK’) and Corey Taylor, for some reason, who says “The notion of government approved rock music is like military intelligence, an oxymoron.” Well, it’s good that you’ve at least listened to some Michael Franti, Corey, but ‘government approved rock music’ isn’t an oxymoron; it may be unpleasant but it’s not actually contradictory in itself. Somehow, then, last week the paper was telling us to get to the barricades, now it seems to have made some sort of retreat; Oooh - kelly osbourne *got* *drunk*. Who says she’s not a rock rebel, eh? If you want to measure how bright KO fans are, there’s a comp in an ad for her new single - the question is “Who is Kelly’s famous dad?” It’s a multiple choice. Dude, anyone who has any interest in Kelly will only have that interest because of her famous dad. Why not just ask “What is the name of Kelly Osbourne?” Courtney rings the NME to say that whoever started the rumour about her throwing herself on Joe Strummer’s casket “should be shot, with the gun and bullets then being mysteriously wiped clean of any prints.” Okay, we made the last bit up. More funeral news, as Maurice Gibb’s being laid to rest is interrupted by Lulu throwing herself on the casket, wailing and gnashing. She had to be pulled off by Angus Deayton and Helen Shapiro.

The Thrills get a turn to burn a imaginary CD, choosing Al Green, Dexys and Gladys Knight. We suspect they may spend their evenings compiling CDs to be covermounted on New Woman magazine.

The Polyphonic Spree - are they still here? Apparently.

There’s an almost fanziney feel to the Interpol piece - good work, people. Carlos has compiled a list of their obsessive, neurotic fans - Lego Girl, Gerbil Boy, Children of the Corn Girl. They have “Rock Band Found In Pieces By Lake” written all over them.

New Zealand is a hotbed of garage rock - apparently even those singing cows from the anchor advert have adopted an edgier sound. But kudos to Sylvia Patterson who has the cojones to ask Dolf “It would never cross your mind to be ground breaking? Original? Create the dawn of the absolute new?” Dolf’s response - “who says you should progress?” Which, in a way, is even more dispirting, and soul destroying, than that time the Stereophonics admitted to being a meat and potatoes band, and seemed quite proud of the fact.

reviews:
albums:
zwan - mary star of the sea - “for the first time in nearly a decade, [Corgan’s] egotism seems valid”, 8
pale - how to survive chance - “a band with no care for sniping fashion”, 4
more fire crew - more fire crew cv - “destined for success [a year ago]”, 7


singles
sotw: the warlocks - hurricane heart attack - “scrapes your brain”
easyworld - junkies - “indie so faceless it couldn’t be identified by its dental records”
tatu - all the things she said - “the russians are coming. quite literally, too.”

live
flaming lips (“a genius of goodwill”) and british sea power (“genuinely distracting”) - glasgow barrowlands
the get up kids - london ulu “growing up, but at least gracefully”

its funny because it’s true: an nmemail writer says “i was once the sort to quote Urusei yatsuri B-sides to people, but NME started me on other stuff... like music where the musicians have girlfriends.”

STUPID SPOOFS: Writing for RollingStone.com's Digital Beat David Kushner raised a problem with the Music Industry's new ploy of spoofing MP3s. See, what we thought the labels would do would be get some of their staff to hang about and spit in a bucket, cough a bit, hammer and generally make up a track of white noise or other rubbish. But what the labels - who really are so stupid we're considering having Alan Levy sectioned for his own good - have done is to make Red Hot Chilli Peppers tracks that just loop, or Alanis Morisette songs which are badly distorted. "How can you tell the difference?" you might wonder, and, as Kushner points out, that's exactly the problem. While the label might expect the punter sat at his 'puter to go "Oh, what a waste of time this downloading is, it'll be quicker to go and get a legitimate copy of the album from a shop", what they're just as likely to think is "Blimey, Alanis has really lost it - this track is just awful. I shan't bother buying that this weekend."

SHAREHOLDERS TUT LOUDLY: We thought maybe we were being predictably outraged at the enormous payouts EMI made to its former rubbish managers, but it seems its not only us. The National Association of Pension Funds - the people who basically own EMI with your money - are urging its members to block the reappointment of Alan Levy as head of recorded music and his henchman Roger Faxon at finance when the shareholders meet on July 19th. They're outraged at the terms of the contract for the two men, which would see Levy trousering about three million quid if his contract got ended early because of takeover. The NAPF point out that, since companies which get taken over tend to be the rubbish ones, this really doesn't give Levy and Faxon much in the way of encouragement to be all they could be. Normally, the NAPF don't vote either way on matters at AGMs, so for them to actively campaign for a 'No' vote shows just how unhappy they are with the way EMI is drawing up contracts - it's akin to the Queen telling a girl with a bunch of flowers to piss off...