The biggest ongoing record company saga of 2008 was surely the revolution going on at London-based EMI. After a year of turmoil in 2007 with on-off-on-off merger talks with Warner Music and the subsequent takeover of the company by private equity firm Terra Firma, some might have thought 2008 at EMI would be calmer, despite its new owner's tendency to publicly criticise the strategies and performance of the old EMI management.
Yes, Terra Firma chief Guy Hands had promised a radical new approach to turn round the company's fortunes, but it was a few months after his August 2007 acquisition before it became clear that that radical new approach would require such a radical revamp of the company's workforce.
The speed of former EMI top man Eric Nicoli's departure the day Terra Firma arrived in 2007 may have been a bit of a surprise, but it hadn't really shocked anyone. It was the sudden departure of the well respected and much liked boss of EMI UK, Tony Wadsworth, in the first week of January of this year, that hammered home the fact that this label overhaul was going to be far reaching.
Later in January the EMI workforce was told that one third of their number would be axed in the first half of 2008, and in the following months countless more senior EMI execs from right across the world packed their bags as Terra Firma streamlined what it thought was an excessive number of labels and divisions and imprints.
Reinforcing that Hands and his Terra Firma team wanted a new approach at EMI, many of the new appointments to fill the increasingly vacant senior management roles came from outside the record industry.
It's Hands' view that EMI is primarily a marketing and digital business, and so he recruited those with marketing and digital expertise. Elio Leoni-Sceti, a marketing man from household goods firm Reckitt Benckiser, became CEO for EMI Music, while former Google exec Douglas Merrill got a COO and digital supremo role. Even internal promotions favoured those with digital or marketing expertise, the boss of the major's US marketing department Ronn Werre being one of the few existing EMIers to get a place on the new top team.
Though that's not to say the new owners don't recognise that some record industry experience is necessary even at the all-new streamlined EMI. Leading the new look major's A&R activity in the US and UK is Nick Gatfield, headhunted from Universal's Island Records, while the major brought in music producer and development artist consultant Billy Mann firstly to the role of Chief Creative Officer, and then to head up A&R activity outside Britain and North America.
Later in the year, once Leoni-Sceti was in place to take over the day-to-day management of the major's recorded music division (the more successful EMI Music Publishing has been more or less left to its own devices throughout all of this), more details of this radical new structure was revealed. Instead of a plethora of different labels within EMI, structured differently from territory to territory, moving forward the major will have just three mega-divisions all over the world - New Music, Catalogue and Music Services. Sitting somewhere in between is a new central marketing department.
I think it's fair to say the whole restructure took a lot longer than Hands had originally hoped, with contractual commitments to both senior execs and artists reportedly making it harder (and more costly) to wield the axe than had been first anticipated. All of which means the new look EMI has really only come into being in the final months of 2008 and it remains to be seen if it was all worth it.
At the start of the year there were reports of artists grumbling that all their friends at the record company were being fired, and the managers of the some of the major's biggest stars expressed concern that Hands was keeping them in the dark. But then again, the management community had to admit that they, for years, had been criticising the major record companies for failing to adapt to the changing music market. Many of their number had called for radical change at the majors, and so, to an extent, Hands' radical approach to his new toy couldn't be completely dismissed. Senior execs at EMI's competitors, meanwhile, looked on with interest.
All of which means that while 2008 has seen EMI rely heavily on major album releases by the likes of Coldplay and Katy Perry, traditional album releases in the main marketed in traditional ways, 2009 could be the year that things really start to change at the London-based record company - with their recently launched new label-wide website EMI.com maybe, or maybe not, part of that new approach. Time will tell. Managers and execs at other majors will certainly continue to watch- just in case Leoni-Sceti and his team do, through genius or good fortune, stumble across the record company business model of the future.