EMI Archives

Moses Supposes: Goodbye, Edgar; We Hardly Knew Ya

Moses Avalon is one of the nation’s leading music-business consultants and artists’-rights advocates and is the author of a top-selling music business reference, Confessions of a Record Producer. More of his articles can be found at www.mosesavalon.com.

Is the Bronfman exit the sign of great things to come in the record biz?

So Warner Music Group chairman Edgar Bronfman quit. Who cares? Well, I do, and so should you if you’re an artist or anyone who services one.

I never met Mr. Bronfman. The closest I came was to sit a table away from him at an awards function years ago, and here is the embarrassing part: I didn’t even know it was him.

Ed changed the music business, and though we could argue for another ten years as to whether he changed it for better or worse, the truth is that it’s now irrelevant, because it’s his departure and this particular time that has meaning. Now that the most significant (albeit not the largest) label, Warner, is in control and positioned to be the most influential distributor in the game, what is the Russian guy who bought it gonna do? He’s going to clean house as step one.

Ed didn’t just quit. He was fired. Not with a pink slip, but by the natural merger and acquisitions attrition of a golden parachute and planned obsolescence. If you didn’t see this coming, you’re not paying close enough attention to the recent music-biz math.

Moses Supposes: BS chart of the weak

Boy, it pains me to have to agree with Bob Lefsetz, but his take on this “Chart of the Day” business is on the money. The chart is pure nonsense. And no, my use of the pun “weak” in the banner is not one of my common misspellings.

For those catching up, a chart on Silicon Alley Insider of unspecific authorship titled “The Death of the Music Industry” has gone viral. Most of the sites re-posting and re-Tweeting it as “fact,” no surprise, are those that cater to the technology industry. If you’re a reader of mine, you’ll be able to see the flaws in its logic at first glance. As the tech industry loses its grip on its insidious campaign to devalue music, biased stories of the “dying music biz” become more and more transparent.

In essence, the chart shows the decline in CD shipments and how digital sales have not made up the difference. Duh. Everyone knows that, but how is a decline in CD unit shipments equal the “death” of an industry that still brings in $10 billion per year domestically, and has been growing in revenue consistently over the past five years (albeit slowly) while everything else in the Western world is falling apart?

ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC all have posted record-breaking revenue year after year, and though it’s true that EMI is headed for the auction block, Universal and Sony don’t seem to be selling their corporate jets anytime soon.

The chart bases its logic by showing a decline in units shipped as reported by the RIAA. It’s no secret to my readers that not only does RIAA shipping data not demonstrate the entire music-revenue picture, it doesn’t even give you enough pieces of the puzzle to render the outline. Why?

You want the charts? Here are the charts. (See my chart of the week.)

Moses Supposes: Epic gives up the Ghost

Ah, what happened to the days when being a music executive meant that you could party with the acts in your office, sleep late, yell at underlings, and get rewarded even if your numbers were bad? Well, they’re still here, unless you happen to have one important character flaw: a vagina.

You gotta read this Hollywood Reporter article on the firing of Epic president Amanda Ghost first, if you haven’t already.

You know, I’ve always said that as far as sexism is concerned, the music space defied the odds. We have far more female executives in positions of true power than probably just about any other industry, except maybe TV.

In my first book, Confessions of a Record Producer, in the “Miscellaneous Myths” section, I actually have a chapter called “Are Women Discriminated Against in the Music business?” Using statistics and raw data, it proves that the answer is “no.” We have a great deal more gals in the driver’s seat than any other biz. But after what Epic and, independently, the law firm of Boies Schiller have done, I think that I need to take another look.

Moses Supposes: EMI will not die, says CEO

It must be tough to be Roger Faxon right now. In early November, he wakes up to find that not only has his sugar daddy, Terra Firma, lost in court to its lender Citigroup, but many bloggers and journalists (me included) had written an epitaph to EMI, the company he runs, essentially throwing dirt on the grave of the major label before the coroner’s report is signed. Tired of pulling employees off the ledge of the building, Faxon fired back.

In an odd move, rather than call a press conference to publicly diffuse all the negative speculations, which would have opened his comments to journalists’ scrutiny, Faxon opted for a private memo to EMI staff. In essence, he called the press irresponsible and implied that the blogosphere should bugger off.