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EMI From The 1960s Onwards

The music publishing side of EMI Ltd was remarkably successful from the 1960s onwards; artists such as The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra and Cliff Richard ensured continuing profitability for the company during this period.  EMI owned and ran a number of subsidiary labels which are themselves a roll call of famous name – Parlophone, HMV, Columbia and Capitol to name a few.  In 1967 HMV was made into an exclusively classical label and to accommodate progressive rock bands such as Pink Floyd, a new label, Harvest Records, was created.

A period of amalgamation and renaming began to occur in the early 1970s, beginning in 1971 with the alteration of Electrical & Musical Industries to EMI Ltd.  In 1972, Columbia became EMI Records and in 1974 The Gramophone Company also took that name.  In 1979, United Artists Records and their subsidiaries, Liberty Records and Imperial Records, were scooped up by EMI Ltd. The really big merger came towards the end of 1979 when EMI Ltd joined with THORN Electrical Industries to become Thorn EMI.

Thorn EMI

Thorn EMI was an enormous company, big enough to have a presence on the FTSE 100 and listed on the London Stock

Exchange.  The company’s various arms were prolific in several industries – television and video broadcasting, computer software, consumer electronics – but it’s main focus remained on the music industry and (from THORN) the defence industry, in which it was one of the biggest players.  Communications, radar and electronic warfare  were it’s specialities.

On the music front, the company continued to expand, adding Chrysalis Records in two stages between 1989 and 1991 and in 1992 it purchased Richard Branson’s Virgin Records for an estimated $1 billion – a huge purchase at the time.

In 1996, aware of the diversification of various parts of the business, the decision was made by Thorn EMI shareholders to demerge.  What resulted on the music and entertainment side was EMI Group PLC, still an extremely large music label which, with the acquisition of Virgin, had maintained it’s position at the pinnacle of the music industry.  It is now one of the ‘big four’ record labels, the others being Warner Music Group, Sony BMG, and Universal Music Group.

Robbie Williams

Like most record labels, EMI Group was a little slow recognising the importance of the online music revolution but in 2000 it signed a deal with Streamwaves, a relatively new digital streaming service, to licence it’s catalogue onto a digital format.  Not long after this, EMI Group also signed the biggest ever record deal in the U.K. with Robbie Williams and the second in the world after Michael Jackson’s record deal.  It was worth an incredible $160 million.

Events since 2007 have hit EMI Group’s fortunes sharply and a drop in profits led to a £4 billion takeover by venture capitalists Terra Firma Capital Partners.  It was forced to cut back in various markets, particularly Asia, and various high profile artists began to leave the label.  Citigroup acquired EMI from Terra Firma early in 2011 and it has recently been reported that Warner Music Group are a possible buyer, a purchase which would reduce the ‘big four’ to the ‘big three’.

 

 

Electrical and Muscical Industries Ltd is one of the ‘big four’ record labels in the industry today and subsequently a major player in the global music business.  It has a long and interesting history of mergers and acquisitions and in fact it’s founding can be traced to a merger back in 1931.

That’s a good place to start then and if you’ve read our Columbia Records history, you’ll know that the story of Columbia Records largely ends when that of EMI begins.  In March 1931, the Columbia Graphophone Company and the Gramophone Company merged, forming a company called Electrical and Musical Industries Ltd that contained Columbia’s knowledge of recording technology and roster of artists and the Gramophone Company’s experience with recording equipment.  This was an acquisition made in London and the headquarters of the new company was based there.

EMI & Music

The new company continued Columbia’s track record of innovative music creation and the British Empire’s vast territory provided an enormous market for the releases.  All the larger Commonwealth countries such as Canada, Australia and India were targeted and subsidiary record labels were established in these areas to promote EMI there.  The legendary Abbey Road Studios in London were opened by EMI in 1931, playing host to classical recording artists in the early years and in the 1940s recruiting George Martin, the future Beatles manager, to work there.

EMI enjoyed four decades of almost complete dominance in these markets and it wasn’t until the 1960s that local labels began to provide some competition.  From the 1930s to the 1950s, EMI featured some of the most famous names in the history of popular music on it’s various subsidiaries, as you would expect from a company with such market dominance.  A few example are Elvis Presley (HMV), Gene Vincent (Capitol), The Goons (Parlophone) and Frank Sinatra (Capitol).

The 1960s were no different although this was a period in which EMI was beginning to face competition from other labels;  The Beatles (Parlophone/EMI/Capitol/Apple), Gerry & The Pacemakers (Columbia Graphophone) and Pink Floyd (Tower/Harvest/EMI/Capitol/Columbia).  Post-1960s, the artists number in the many hundreds but suffice to say the roster still includes many of the world’s biggest recording artists; other music genres were not neglected and classical music in particular has always been championed by EMI.

EMI & Technology

The two companies which formed the original merger brought with them a wealth of technology which enabled them to remain in the forefront of recording and playback research.  Alan Blumlein, one of the pioneers of stereo recording, was unfortunately killed in the British war effort when working on experimental radar technology.  EMI continued to produce radar and guided missile technology until well after the end of the Second World War.

 

EMI’s laboratory in Hayes continued to branch of into interesting directions in the subsequent decades under the leadership of Godfrey Hounfield, developing a colour camera (EMI 2001) for the BBC and ITV, Britain’s first transistorised computer in 1958 (the EMIDEC 1100) and  the first CAT scanner for medical imaging.

Part Two follows….