EMI

» see emi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Electric and Musical Industries was formed in March 1931 when the Gramophone Company merged with Columbia Graphophone. The Gramophone half went back to 1897 and owned the painting of the dog listening to the horn, so the new company inherited both His Master's Voice and a manufacturing operation that made the machines as well as the discs. In its first year it opened a recording studio in a house on Abbey Road in St John's Wood.

For the next fifty years EMI was one of the handful of companies that decided what recorded music the world heard. Parlophone signed the Beatles in 1962 after everyone else in London had passed. Capitol Records in America came under the same roof and Pink Floyd spent their whole career on the label. By the time the industry had settled into an oligopoly of four majors, EMI was the only British one left standing in it.

In August 2007 Terra Firma Capital Partners bought the company for 4.2 billion pounds, and about 2.6 billion of that was money Citigroup had lent for the purpose. The recorded music business was contracting at the time and the debt did not care. Citigroup took full ownership on 1 February 2011 and wrote off 2.2 billion pounds of what it was owed. Then it put EMI up for sale. The publishing catalog went to a Sony-led investor group for $2.2 billion on 29 June 2012. Universal Music Group closed on the recorded music side for 1.2 billion pounds on 28 September 2012, and there was no longer an EMI to be the parent of anything.

~ the case file ~

~ before it sold records ~

The electrical half of the name did real work. Alan Blumlein was on the staff in the early 1930s and patented stereophonic sound there, filing in 1931 for a system nobody would have a use for commercially until the late 1950s. A research team under Isaac Shoenberg built the Marconi-EMI television system that the BBC adopted in 1936, which is the reason British television went fully electronic rather than staying with a spinning disc. During the war the laboratories at Hayes built radar sets and fire-control equipment for the Air Ministry.

Then there is the scanner. Godfrey Hounsfield was an EMI electrical engineer with no medical training who worked out that you could reconstruct a cross-section of a solid object from a large number of X-ray readings taken at different angles, and the company let him build it. The first clinical CT scan was done on a patient in 1971. EMI took a Queen's Award for Technological Innovation in 1973. Hounsfield took the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1979, for work he had done on a record company's payroll.

~ four point two billion pounds ~

Terra Firma was a private equity house and Guy Hands had made his name buying pubs and cinemas. Nobody on the team had run a label. The plan involved cost discipline and a hard look at what the company was spending on artists, which is a defensible thing to say about a balance sheet and a poor thing to say out loud in an industry where the assets can leave. Radiohead went first and described the new owners as a confused bull in a china shop. Paul McCartney had already gone. The Rolling Stones and Robbie Williams either left or said in public what they thought of the new management.

Hands then sued Citigroup for misrepresenting the auction, claiming a banker had invented a rival bidder to push the price up. He lost in New York in 2010 and had the verdict overturned on appeal. He dropped the retrial in 2016. Terra Firma's equity was gone by then and Citigroup had written off most of the loan, so the 2007 deal managed to destroy about 1.5 billion pounds on one side and 800 million on the other before anyone had argued about who was at fault.

~ the istanbul subsidiary ~

EMI had a Turkish arm and it is the reason this one is not a foreign story. Kent Elektronik in Istanbul was the licensee, which meant the Parlophone cassettes on Turkish shelves through the 1980s and early 1990s were manufactured here under contract, the Beatles catalog included. EMI Music bought 51 percent of Kent and renamed the company EMI-Kent with effect from 1 January 1995. So the tapes that went into a Turkish car stereo in that period were an EMI product at two removes, and then at one. Nothing about the packaging made that visible to whoever bought them.

~ who kept which piece ~

The grave is the company and not the name, because the name is still working. European regulators made Universal divest Parlophone as a condition of the 2012 purchase, so Warner bought that label in 2013 along with EMI Classics. Universal kept Capitol and Abbey Road, and relaunched EMI Records as one of its own imprints in 2020. On the other side of the split, Sony took full ownership of EMI Music Publishing in 2018.

Type emi.com into a browser today and Universal Music Group's homepage loads. That is the cleanest statement of what happened available anywhere. A company that ran for eighty one years and patented stereo recording along the way now resolves to the front door of the firm that bought its records.

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