For those of you wondering what Terra Firma chief Guy Hands has in store for his new toy - the EMI Group - well, he's been chatting about that very thing, a bit, at the Royal Television Society's annual conference in Cambridge.
The main thing to come out of his chattering is that he says rumours he plans to sell off the major's less successful recorded music division pronto, possibly to Warner Music, so to concentrate on the more profitable EMI music publishing business are just not true. According to The Times, he told the conference: "We will definitely keep EMI Music [the recorded music bit]. We are committed to making it viable".
So that's good news for everyone at EMI Music. Well, it would be had he not then started talking about the need for some major restructuring within the recorded music division (yes, even more restructuring, hot on the heels of the restructuring initiated by former chief Eric Nicoli earlier this year). He continued: "We have to get away from the cult of the hit. This can't be an industry where it is only possible to make a profit from selling two million albums". He's right of course, but alas 'restructuring' normally means job cuts, and that was definitely the inference many took from Hands' first formal commentary on his plans for the London based major.
In a bid to motivate his workforce in the face of major job cuts, Hands concluded by, erm, telling them they're rubbish. "[We hope EMI is] as bad as we think it is", he joked, adding that his own team's skills were in turning round companies in "crisis", citing previous acquisition, the then struggling Odeon cinema chain, as an example, on which he remarked "people [there] thought they were in the film business when in fact they were in the popcorn business".
Hmm, I can't help thinking that if EMI wasn't in internal crisis it will be now Hands has gone public about this thoughts on the company. One thing is for certain, interesting times are ahead.