News
EMI Still Afloat (At Least Until Next Year)
As any music consumer knows, it's quite difficult to feel any pity for dying major record labels. However, in EMI's case, it's a huge relief knowing that the so-called "big four" majors will not shrink to three at least until March of 2011.
As we reported here at the beginning of the week, EMI was in grave danger of foreclosing to its lender, international sub-prime mortgage lover Citibank. With Sony Music Entertainment licking his chops at the opportunity to purchase the failing label, EMI's largest investor, private equity company Terra Firma, and their chairman Guy Hands ("Man Mitts" to his friends) have pledged $155 million USD to save the company from sure destruction.
For now your watered-down music is safe from being completely submerged. [Hypebot]
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They definitely have some watered down stuff but I do like some of their acts like LCD, Free Energy etc
Those bands are on DFA, an independent label. However, DFA has an exclusive distribution deal with EMI, but as with most deals like this, I believe EMI has no creative input over DFA artists, they just bank on record sales as they're in charge of getting the records to the stores (because it's pretty much impossible for an indie to come up with that kind of dough).
It's similar to the Alternative Distribution Alliance, which was started by Warner and Sub-Pop (of which I believe Warner still has controlling interest in). While Warner owns the distributor, it distributes albums from indie labels such as Epitaph, Matador, Saddle Creek etc.