EMI chief confident of ability to call a new tune
Major music label EMI has a new boss who is looking to change things around. Consider these statistics:
* Record companies lose money on 85 per cent of new artists, even before overheads
* More than 30 per cent of EMI’s artists have not produced an album. Many never will
* 200 of the 14,000 artists EMI deals with each year account for more than half its sales
* 7 per cent of EMI’s digital contracts account for 80 per cent of its digital revenues
Today, in for artists that are presumably distributed via CDs, 1.4% account for 50% of sales. Will that tail flatten if EMI goes all-digital? Hard to say. One thing is for sure - EMI runs a very inefficient business:
* Its marketing expenditure has been running about £60m over budget
* EMI scraps about 20 per cent of CDs produced, at an annual cost of £25m
* EMI spends £70m a year subsidising artists who will never make it any money.
They could do a lot with an extra £155m.