EMI's slow restructuring gains clarity

28/04/2008 03:15

By Ed Christman

NEW YORK (Billboard) - The restructuring of British record label EMI will be one of the most ambitious reworkings of a major music company yet seen by the industry.

EMI, now owned by private equity firm Terra Firma, wants to lay off 2,000 employees as part of a plan to tear down label walls and international boundaries, and focus more on finding new talent.

So far a small amount of the expected job cuts have taken place at EMI’s Christian Music Group and, most recently in the radio promotion department at Capitol/Virgin, which handles such acts as Coldplay and Lenny Kravitz.

These moves only hint at what’s to come. When all is said and done, EMI will have three centralized groups, divided by function, instead of by label and region, sources say.

The company is centralizing all marketing, sales, catalogue and digital forces under a global music services group. The purpose of peeling away these functions from the labels was to have a smaller head count but allow for more efficiencies. In the traditional music business, if one label was hot and another cold, or if one had a heavy release schedule and the other didn’t, it became a resource allocation challenge.

A support services group will round up EMI’s back-office functions. Driving the music will be a centralized group, to be headed by former Island Records Group .....continued below

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president Nick Gatfield. In some cases some labels will remain intact, like EMI Latin and EMI Christian. But other A&R (artists and repertoire)staffers will be genre or regional specialist, instead of reporting to specific labels like EMI Nashville, jazz division Blue Note, Virgin, Capitol or dance-focused Astralwerks.

Reuters/Billboard

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