Ex-Yahoo VP’s Recipe For Saving EMI

"With the disappearance of advantaged label competencies such as superior production, distribution, and marketing, reconfigure your labels to be based around affinities and focused narrowly enough to serve roughly the same audiences from release to release. The labels would be very small teams responsible for fan cultivation, focused and direct marketing, and A&R. They would rely on EMI for service, support, and tools (generic marketing would happen on the EMI mothership, for example)." – former Yahoo Music VP Ian Rogers

Rogers goes into more depth of his Fistfulayen blog and its worth reading. (read some great comments too)  If you’ve followed my Can The Music Industry Save Itself? series, you know that I agree that labels must set up teams to serve the niches.

Here’s why it may not happen…

Why don’t EMI or someone else try this? Here is part of a comment I shared on Ian’s blog:

Why don’t they do it? Fear of change. They’ve been chasing mega-hits for so long; they can’t admit that day is over. After all, one hit pays for many misses. And if they go for this plan then it means sweeping the rest of their old school buddies out the door. I don’t think they’ll need an "I Know How To Buy A Hit" label team.

But the idea could lead to the creation of some new major label groups created from the bottom up. For example, ATO – who just bought back their independence from Sony BMG for $5M and says it wants to form a "legacy" indie have the cash an the smarts to do it.