EMI CEO Leoni-Sceti” “We’ve Clearly Lost Touch”
"We must complement our artists’ creativity with our own skills in
innovation. That means listening to the desires and needs of consumers
and delivering new products and services that they want to buy...
We have a situation where 70% of music consumption is digital and yet only about 20% of music company revenues are derived from digital. Music is in demand and the demand is growing all the time, but we’ve clearly lost touch with our consumers.
I passionately believe that if we listen to our consumers, this gap will become our opportunity. "
– EMI CEO Elio Leoni-Sceti
confirming his participation in the Creativity and Business International Network forum
confirming his participation in the Creativity and Business International Network forum
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Revolutionary.
Wow, Doug Merrill didn’t put them on the road to revolution before he got shitcanned (or shitcanned them)? I guess not everyone who comes from Google is a genius.
EMI has been desperate for a long time, and as a result, they earned the reputation for being the major that would actually sign a deal with a digital startup first. When Jay Samit was there, EMI played ball with almost anyone, so long as they paid an advance and the numbers were right. The by-product of this was that EMI was way more open to experimentation than most of the other majors. They’ve even had talks with P2P companies in the past year.
If any major really wants to “listen to consumers”, they’ll hear two things:
1) Your music is priced too high. Way too high.
2) Once I buy it, I want to do whatever I want with it.
They’ll realize that the best way of marketing music isn’t thru radio or press or retail, its thru encouraging it to travel amongst consumers. Once EMI or any major truly realizes that fact, they’ll start figuring out how to monitize that model.
Of course, even if the majors did see the light, you’d still have to lock everyone at Harry Fox and Ascap/BMI into a steel vault and drop it into the ocean for anything to change.
They should have started listening to their customers a long time ago. It’s too late methinks.