This is the continuing saga of Britain's greatest music company as it faces an uncertain future under new ownership. Since 2009 EMI has broken new acts and sold millions of records BUT the massive debts incurred by its owners Terra Firma have finally taken it to the brink of a break-up. Music industry experts and executives, financiers and commentators plus artists' managers assess EMI's fortunes as the company celebrates its 80th birthday. Includes interviews with many key players including former EMI Group/EMI Music executives Sir Colin Southgate, Jim Fifield, Eric Nicoli, Tony Wadsworth, David Munns, Rupert Perry, Ray Cooper and Jon Webster. He has also interviewed many managers, music journalists, financial analysists and rival record company executives.

The recording industry has been a major focus of interest for cultural commentators throughout the twenty-first century. As the first major content industry to have its production and distribution patterns radically disturbed by the internet, the recording industry’s content, attitudes and practices have regularly been under the microscope. Much of this discussion, however, is dominated by US and UK perspectives and assumes the ‘the recording industry’ to be a relatively static, homogeneous, entity. This book attempts to offer a broader, less Anglocentric and more dynamic understanding of the recording industry. It starting premise is the idea that the recording industry is not one thing but is, rather, a series of recording industries, locally organised and locally focused, both structured by and structuring the international industry. Seven detailed case studies of different national recording industries illustrate this fact, each of them specifically chosen to provide a distinctive insight into the workings of the recording industry. The expert contributions to this book provide the reader with a sense of the history, structure and contemporary dynamics of the recording industry in these specific territories, and counteract the Anglo-American bias of coverage of the music industry. The International Recording Industrieswill be valuable to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, cultural economics and popular music studies.

“Industry expert Phil Hardy has outdone himself with the splendid, piecing Download!” – Record Collector Download! chronicles of the making of the new record industry, from the boom years of the CD revolution of the late 1980s to the crisis of the present day, with particular stress on the last decade. Following the actions and reactions of the major international record companies as they ploughed their way through the digital revolution, bewildered by the fleet-of-foot digital innovators who were far more responsive to the changing marketing conditions. Download! delves even further into the structural change that has, almost surreptitiously, taken place, within the music business. A change that has left the captains of the record industry as unable to act as they were unwilling to act.

The Beatles produced five films during their time together: A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Magical Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine, and Let It Be. Some were cinematic successes, and some were not, but—along with subsequent reissues, bonus material, and Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, a documentary companion to Let It Be—they comprise an endlessly fascinating document of key phases in the group’s career. In this comprehensive deep-dive into the band’s movies, author and longtime music journalist Steve Matteo follows the origins, filming, and often frenzied fan reception of projects from the 1964 premiere of A Hard Day’s Night through 1970’s Let It Be to the release of Get Back in 2022. Matteo explores the production process, original theatrical film releases, subsequent VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray releases, and bonus materials, along with the US and UK soundtracks. In addition to copious anecdotes and behind-the-scenes details, he also places these films in their larger context, a period of unprecedented artistic and commercial innovation in British and world cinema. Filled with stories and insights that will satisfy collectors, buffs, and casual fans alike, this is the definitive account of an underappreciated part of the Beatles’ creative output.

This book explores the nature of the music industries before and after the digital revolution from the point of view of the consumer, and explores the question of whether there is a role for competition policy intervention in the music industries. Considering the historically consolidated environment of the music industries, and their rapidly evolving business models in the twenty-first century, the author argues that there is a need for updated competition design to promote consumer welfare and competition in these markets. Opening a much-needed interdisciplinary dialogue across music studies, business, and law, the book applies business model literature to antitrust law in the context of the music industries. It offers a comprehensive history of encounters between the music industry and antitrust and regulatory authorities in the US, UK, and EU, from the payola scandals of the 1950s to the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2010, showing how even as business models in the industry have changed, it has repeatedly moved towards consolidation with little regulation. Drawing on this history, it considers how competition policy can foster innovation and safeguard consumer interests in the music markets of the future. Offering new analytical and methodological tools, this book is relevant to those studying the music industries from business, legal, and cultural perspectives.

An anecdotal history of the record industry on both sides of the Atlantic focuses on leading label founders, talent scouts and A&R men who understood the industry's dual music and business natures, drawing parallels between the industry setbacks of the 1920s and 30s and the recent CD crash.

The Beatles. The Beach Boys. Blur, Bowie, Kylie Minogue, Kate Bush, and Coldplay. EMI was one of the big four record companies, with some of the biggest names in the history of recorded music on its roster. Dominating the music industry for over 100 years, by 2010 EMI Group had reported massive pre-tax losses. The group was divided up and sold in 2011. How could one of the greatest recording companies of the 20th century have ended like this? With interviews from insiders and music industry experts, Eamonn Forde pieces together the tragic end to a financial juggernaut and a cultural institution in forensic detail. The Final Days of EMI: Selling the Pig is the story of the British recording industry, laid bare in all its hubris and glory.