In recent years, EMI has been faced with many challenges.
There have been many big events that have changed EMI in recent years, such as buying Virgin music group and being bought by Terra Firma.
Also EMI’s popularity has increased a lot due to famous artists being signed, and the
Growth of the company has not stopped.
The 90’s proved to be a good decade for EMI.
It was in the early 90’s that EMI bought Virgin music group, who at the time were the largest independent music company in the world, whose roster included bands such as Smashing Pumpkins, Massive Attack, The rolling Stones and Janet Jackson.
EMI had started the decade with a positive outlook, and they were ready for anything.
Another great achievement of the 90’s was the signing of Robbie Williams and The Spice Girls.
These two artists were the two most popular artists of the 90’s, and as a result, EMI gained a large amount of popularity from it.
The Spice Girls formed in 1994, signed to Virgin records in 1995 and released their first single in 1996.
The Spice Girls completely changed pop music and girl groups in particular.
Robbie Williams joined EMI in 1996 and his first album came out in 1997.
The 90’s was also the time in which digital music was first introduced.
This was a big step forward in technology, and EMI was well placed to capitalise on the trend.
EMI started up their first websites in 1993 and 1994. This was a very important step because of how the internet was becoming more and more popular, and by making a website EMI would become more popular.
4 years after the website was created, EMI streamed the first complete album over the internet, which was Mezzanine by Massive Attack.
In the years that followed, EMI succeeded in accomplishing many other important digital advances such as being the first company to release a digital album download, launching the first internet video single, and being the first major music company to make new music available digitally to consumers at the same time as it is serviced to radio stations.
After this in 2007, EMI became the first major music company to make it’s music available without digital rights management (DRM) software and at much higher sound quality.
In 2007, EMI was acquired by the private equity firm Terra Firma.
Terra Firma bought EMI for £3.2 billion after a dramatic decline in sales and the announcement that EMI had sustained a loss of £260 million in 2006/2007.
At the same time, EMI’s British market share dropped from 16% to 9%.
After this happened, several important artists walked away from EMI, including Radiohead.
Paul McCartney left ahead of the Terra Firma takeover, and The Rolling Stones signed a one-album deal with Universal which expired on February 2008.
Overall I think that EMI has been very successful in keeping up with the newest technologies and keeping on top of the competition.
Even though EMI has recently had a big money loss, I think that it will still continue to be one of the biggest and most popular music companies and labels, and that it will keep progressing and achieving great things.

No comments:
Post a Comment