Why EMI being purchased by Universal is not such a cause for Celebration

My time “working for” Universal was a massive disappointment. No, scratch that - it was depressing. You would have thought singing for a rock band on a major label would be about as good as it gets - but the internal world of the major label is a far cry from that which you dream about in bed, or read about in biographies.

Island records - the subsidiary we were with - has a fantastically rich history of bands it had nurtured through several early albums with enough artistic belief to support them through the sheer love of the music until they “made it” (or even not). Now I wouldn’t say that we had anything near the potential of U2 or Nick Drake - yet we were never going to get to find out. Although there were some at the label who professed a love for what we wrote, the bald reality was that funds from the 10 or so bands in our “generation” were channelled quickly into those who “caught” immediately - in our case The Feeling and The Fratellis.

The A&R team could not say whether U2 would have been dropped after their first album with today’s business model, which is beholden to instant hits. Even after The Feeling had had their 1st record time in sun, we all knew that they would not bother to promote the second - however good it was. That’s just not how the model works.

So why is this? What has changed since even as recently as the 1990s? Well, Universal - being entirely owned by the French used-to-just-be-a-water-company Vivendi, is focused exclusively on creating “shareholder value”. That’s WHY it exists. But surely shareholders would be interested in long term “big acts”? Well, they would be true - but shareholders don’t really CARE about the long term (the average stock is held for 22 seconds - yep, you read that right) and the CEOs are consequently judged primarily on their short-term performance this year or even this quarter. Island were not interested in who might make great albums in 2 or 3 years time - they were not even interested in who will make them money in 2 years time - just who will give the maximum return on investment right now.

I am presuming, and not without some measure of reality, that this model is quite far from the reason why Chris Blackwell (or Alan McGee, Geoff Travis etc) started the whole thing running. Sure, they weren’t averse to making a buck - but was that their sole focus? Unlike today, they found and brought us music we didn’t know we wanted hear, but turned out to be excellent. Those awesome independent labels have one by one been swallowed up (with a few notable expections, like Simon Raymond’s Bella Union) .

It’s not that EMI was even that “independent”, but it thought like an Independent for many years - or seemed like it did - genuinely caring about what it put out for it’s intrinsic musicality rather than it’s instant monetary return.

And now even this has been swallowed by the no-face like beast that is the major label assimilation machine.