3/31/2004 05:19:00 PM

Music Giant EMI Axes Artists and 1,500 Jobs

LONDON/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - EMI Group Plc on Wednesday became the latest big music company to slash costs to cope with an ailing market, cutting 1,500 jobs, or 20 percent of its work force, trimming its roster of artists by a fifth and outsourcing CD and DVD manufacturing.

British-based EMI -- the world's third largest music company and home to the Rolling Stones, Coldplay and Norah Jones -- forecast it would save at least 50 million pounds ($92 million) a year from the restructuring.

Other music companies, such as Sony Corp.'s, Warner Music and Bertelsmann AG have recently restructured to compete effectively in an industry beset by piracy, falling sales, competition from video games and a dearth of new music genres.
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A dearth of new music genres?? What? Are the writers of this article trying to come up with a new cause to add to the list of woes that the poor little multi-national music cartels are having to deal with? Oh no! We have fallen behind in creating new music genres! What?

Sustainable production, distribution and consumption of artistic products is, long term, not solved by building huge holding companies to rape and monetize in the name of art. We need to begin looking to more distributed models of music publishing. We need an IPG of music. Perhaps the CC will help. We think about these things at IR.

I think direct patronage is a model that may provide many artists who would never make it big in the well-defined radio formats of the global markets with a sustainable path to being artists for a living. Micro-patronage has a place in this space in the not so distant future I think. There have been many times, after picking up a song on Kazaa, that I wanted to be able to throw a buck or two to the artist in a simple manner. Often, instead, I went out and bought the CD--of which the artists received a few pennies.

I don't like the only two options to be piracy or buying a CD. Well, there is the iTunes option, but I hate impure formats that have security layers to enforce "the license." We need more options.