The Rise Fall Of Emi Records

This is the continuing saga of Britain's greatest music company as it faces an uncertain future under new ownership. Since 2009 EMI has broken new acts and sold millions of records BUT the massive debts incurred by its owners Terra Firma have finally taken it to the brink of a break-up. Music industry experts and executives, financiers and commentators plus artists' managers assess EMI's fortunes as the company celebrates its 80th birthday. Includes interviews with many key players including former EMI Group/EMI Music executives Sir Colin Southgate, Jim Fifield, Eric Nicoli, Tony Wadsworth, David Munns, Rupert Perry, Ray Cooper and Jon Webster. He has also interviewed many managers, music journalists, financial analysists and rival record company executives.

Louis Barfe's elegantly written, authoritative and highly entertaining history charts the meteoric rise and slow decline of the popular recording industry. In what is the only book to consider the development of the music business on both sides of the Atlantic, Barfe's journey starts with the first ever record to be played on a tin-foil cylinder phonograph and arrives in the present to meet an industry in disarray. He shows how the 1920s and 1930s saw the departure of Edison from the phonograph business he created and the birth of EMI and CBS. In this years after the war, these companies, and the buccaneers, entrepreneurs, hucksters, impresarios and con-men who ran them, reaped stupendous commercial benefits with the arrival of Elvis Presley, who changed popular music (and the sales of popular music) almost overnight. After Presley came the Beatles, when the recording industry became global and record sales reached all time highs.

The recording industry has been a major focus of interest for cultural commentators throughout the twenty-first century. As the first major content industry to have its production and distribution patterns radically disturbed by the internet, the recording industry’s content, attitudes and practices have regularly been under the microscope. Much of this discussion, however, is dominated by US and UK perspectives and assumes the ‘the recording industry’ to be a relatively static, homogeneous, entity. This book attempts to offer a broader, less Anglocentric and more dynamic understanding of the recording industry. It starting premise is the idea that the recording industry is not one thing but is, rather, a series of recording industries, locally organised and locally focused, both structured by and structuring the international industry. Seven detailed case studies of different national recording industries illustrate this fact, each of them specifically chosen to provide a distinctive insight into the workings of the recording industry. The expert contributions to this book provide the reader with a sense of the history, structure and contemporary dynamics of the recording industry in these specific territories, and counteract the Anglo-American bias of coverage of the music industry. The International Recording Industrieswill be valuable to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, cultural economics and popular music studies.

This book explores the nature of the music industries before and after the digital revolution from the point of view of the consumer, and explores the question of whether there is a role for competition policy intervention in the music industries. Considering the historically consolidated environment of the music industries, and their rapidly evolving business models in the twenty-first century, the author argues that there is a need for updated competition design to promote consumer welfare and competition in these markets. Opening a much-needed interdisciplinary dialogue across music studies, business, and law, the book applies business model literature to antitrust law in the context of the music industries. It offers a comprehensive history of encounters between the music industry and antitrust and regulatory authorities in the US, UK, and EU, from the payola scandals of the 1950s to the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2010, showing how even as business models in the industry have changed, it has repeatedly moved towards consolidation with little regulation. Drawing on this history, it considers how competition policy can foster innovation and safeguard consumer interests in the music markets of the future. Offering new analytical and methodological tools, this book is relevant to those studying the music industries from business, legal, and cultural perspectives.

This is the inside story of private equity dealmaking. Over the last 40 years, LBO fund managers have demonstrated that they are good at making money for themselves and their investors. But when one looks beneath the surface of the transactions they engineer, it is apparent that these deals can, at times, go spectacularly wrong. Through 14 business stories, all emanating from the noughties' credit bubble and including headline-grabbing names like Caesars, Debenhams, EMI, Hertz, Seat Pagine Gialle and TXU, The Debt Trap shows how, via controversial practices like quick flips, repeat dividend recaps, heavy cost-cutting and asset-stripping, leveraged buyouts changed, for better or for worse, the way private companies are financed and managed today. From technological disruption in the worlds of music recording and business-directory publishing to economic turbulence in the gambling, real estate and energy sectors, highly levered corporations are often incapable of handling market corrections when debt commitments start piling up. Behind the historical events and the financial empires erected by some of the elite private equity specialists, these 14 in-depth case studies examine how value-maximising techniques and a short-cut mentality can impact investment returns and portfolio assets. Whether you are a PE practitioner, investor, business manager, academic or business student, you will find The Debt Trap to be an authoritative and fascinating account.

This Handbook provides authoritative up-to-date scholarship and debate concerning creativity at work, and offers a timely opportunity to re-evaluate our understanding of creativity, work, and the pivotal relationship between them. Far from being a new arrival on the scene, the context of work has always been a place shaped and sharpened by creativity, as well as a site that determines, where, when, how, and for whom creativity emerges. Structured in four parts – Working with Creativity (the present); Putting Creativity to Work (in an organizational context); Working in the Creative Industries (creative labour); and Making Creativity Work (the future) – the Handbook is an inspirational learning resource, helping us to work with creativity in innovative ways. Providing a cutting edge, interdisciplinary, diverse, and critical collection of academic and practitioner insights, this Handbook ultimately conveys a message of hope: if we take better care of creativity, our creativity will better care for us.

This book provides a theoretically grounded account of the impact of digital technology on the music business, and develops the concept of the musical network to understand the transformation of this economy over space and through time.

The incredible history of how Abbey Road became the most famous recording studio in the world. "There are certain things that are mythical. Abbey Road is mythical."—Nile Rodgers Many people will recognize the famous crosswalk. Some visitors may have graffitied their name on its hallowed outer walls. Others might even have managed to penetrate the iron gates. But what draws in these thousands of fans here, year after year? What is it that really happens behind the doors of the most celebrated recording studio in the world? It may have begun life as an affluent suburban house, but it soon became a creative hub renowned around the world as a place where great music, ground-breaking sounds, and unforgettable tunes were forged. It is nothing less than a witness to, and a key participant in, the history of popular music itself. What has been going on there for over ninety years has called for skills that are musical, creative, technical, mechanical, interpersonal, logistical, managerial, chemical and, romantics might be tempted add, close to magic. The history of Abbey Road may just make you believe.