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overview
This
profile looks at UK music recording and publishing group
EMI.
It covers -
the group
The EMI group comprises over 100 recording labels
in all continents except Antarctica. It is the second-largest
global music publisher (ie music scores).
An indication of EMI holdings as of September 2001 is
here.
corporate history
EMI traces its history to 1898 when William Owen of the
US National Gramophone Company set up a rival business
in the UK under the name The Gramaphone Company, offering
gramophones and sound recordings (along with typewriters
for a few years at the turn of the century) under technical
director Fred Gaisberg.
In 1920 it became a subsidiary of the US Victor Talking
Machine Company, which merged with the Radio Corporation
of America (RCA) in 1929. In 1931
RCA merged Gramophone with the Columbia Gramophone Company
- independent of Columbia Pictures and CBS - and the Parlophone
Company. The new Anglo-American group was established
as Electric & Music Industries Ltd. In the thirties and
forties its interests ranged from lightbulbs, gramophone
and radio production for consumer markets through to radar
systems and broadcasting electronics.
After the 1939-45 war impresario Walter Legge dominated
EMI Records, founding the Philharmonia Orchestra. During
the 1960s EMI recorded the Beatles, licensed several labels
in the US (including the MGM
label) and established the Music For Pleasure and World
Record Club mail-order operations.
During the 1970s it acquired the Associated British Picture
Corporation (ABPC)
and a chain of provincial cinemas, making films such as
The Deerhunter and Murder on the Orient Express
before leaving Hollywood after significant losses.
In 1979 it merged with electronics manufacturer and
leasing group Thorn to form Thorn EMI. Units were bought
and sold with little sense of a coherent corporate strategy,
as the chronology suggests.
In 1992 Thorn EMI bought the Virgin Music Group from Richard
Branson and Japanese conglomerate
Fujisankei for £560m. One
executive is supposed to have quipped that
We
are all very, very sad. But some of us are also very,
very rich.
In
1994 it bought David Balfa's Food music group for £475,000.
A year later it swallowed the Hatchards bookshops and
Dillons bookselling chain (the second largest UK book
retailer) for upwards of £56 million.
In 1996 the ailing electronics business was demerged into
a separate company, Thorn, and the music recording and
retailing arms were renamed EMI Group. In 1998 EMI sold
its 271-strong HMV retail business, along with the Dillons
bookstore chain, to HMV Media for £500m. EMI took a 42.5%
stake in HMV and around £382m in cash.
In 2004 EMI announced that would cease self-manufacturing
CDs and DVDs in Europe and the United States, subsequently
transferring its associated assets in the Netherlands
to MediaMotion, closing its manufacturing plant in Illinois
and selling its Australian CD manufacturing unit (a joint
venture with Warner Music)
to Summit Technology Australia.
In 2006 EMI and Warner Music engaged in a bizarre, bitter
takeover battle with each rejecting an unwelcome US$4.6bn
bid from the other. EMI announced that it had turned down
an offer to be acquired by Warner Music, its smaller rival,
calling the proposal "wholly unacceptable" and
increasing its offer for Warner Music (in turn rebuffed).
EMI and Warner Music had a long history of attempted unions.
In 1998 Edgar Bronfman Jr held talks with EMI about merging
Seagram's Universal music
arm with its London-based rival. Discussions were abortive;
Bronfman led Universal into a takeover by Vivendi
(later using some of his greatly diminished fortune for
a stake in Warner Music when that group was spun off by
Time Warner in 2003).
During 2000 AOL Time Warner failed to acquire EMI. Discussions
for acquisition by Bertelsmann's
BMG did not proceed, with Bertelsmann eventually offloading
its music arm to a joint venture with Sony.
In 2007 EMI agreed to a £2.4bn takeover by the Terra
Firma private equity
group.
A chronology of the group is here.
More detailed information on selected EMI group labels
is here.
studies
There are no major studies on the group as a whole.
For perspectives on the early recording industry see the
works highlighted in the Caslon Analytics Revolutions
profile. Examples are Michael Chanan's Repeated Takes:
A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music
(London: Verso 1995), Norman Lebrecht's When The Music
Stops (New York: Simon & Schuster 1996) and Maestros,
Masterpieces & Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful
Death of the Classical Record Industry (London: Allen
Lane 2007), Expensive habits: The dark side of the
music industry (London: Faber 1986) by Simon Garfield
and Robert Burnett's The Global Jukebox: The International
Music Industry (London: Routledge 1996).
For Gaisberg see his The Music Goes Round (New
York: Arno 1972) and Jerrold Northrop Moore's A Matter
of Records: Fred Gaisberg & the Golden Era of the
Gramophone (New York: Taplinger 1976). For the unlovable
Mr Legge see his own Walter Legge: Words & Music
(London: Duckworth 1998) and the account by his wife Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf On & Off the Record: A Memoir of Walter
Legge (New York: Scribners 1982). Geoffrey Jones'
brief The Gramophone Company: An Anglo-American Multi-National,
1898-1931 in Business History Review (1985)
is suggestive.
Ross Laird's Sound Beginnings: The Early Record Industry
in Australia (Sydney: Currency Press 1999) is the
major account of Australian developments to the late 1920s.
For more recent times see Abbey Road (London: Omnibus
Press ) by Brian Southall & Peter Vince. Since
Records Began: EMI's First One Hundred Years (London:
Batsford 1997) by Peter Martland is a celebratory official
history.
For Thorn see Anatomy of a Merger: A History of GEC,
AEI & English Electric (London: Cape 1970) by
R Jones & O Marriot and From Making to Music:
The History of Thorn-EMI (London: Hodder & Stoughton
1996) another, more formal official history by S A Pandit.
For Richard Branson there is a somewhat indulgent account
in Tom Bower's Branson (London: Fourth Estate 2000)
and Tim Jackson's Virgin King (New York:
HarperCollins 1994). Branson's own Losing My Virginity:
The Autobiography (London: Virgin 1998) is for us
a long advertorial; see Mick Brown's Richard Branson:
The Inside Story (London: Michael Joseph 1988) instead.
Other works are highlighted here.
For Blue Note see Richard Cook's Blue Note Records:
The Biography (London: Secker & Warburg 2001).
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