It seems almost cruel to kick a company when they’re down and gasping for a final breath, but the news from EMI Music just keeps getting more and more bizarre. Only 10 weeks after naming Charles Allen the executive chairman of EMI Music (he replaced Elio Leoni-Scelti, who himself lasted only 18 months), Terra Firma announced that the head of EMI Music Publishing, Roger Faxon, would be replacing Allen, taking over the helm at EMI Music (the record division) as well. Even by music industry standards, that’s an amazing bit of turnover– Allen has gone from executive chairman to a vaguely defined “adviser” role in less than one financial quarter. It’s like watching a bit of time-lapse photography, where a process of destruction that usually takes a year and a half has been condensed into 10 weeks.
And all of this is meant to reassure the investors.
Roger Faxon, Chief Executive EMI Group
The real irony is that after three years of completely inept decision-making, Terra Firma is actually making a pretty good call on this one. At least Faxon has a genuine understanding of the business. While he didn’t build EMI into an industry-leading publisher (that was the work of Marty Bandier, who is now at Sony ATV), he has maintained the company’s status despite the ever-present rumors of the corporate parent’s financial demise. EMI Music Publishing still has one of the strongest executive teams in the business, a catalog full of classic songs, and a current writer roster that made it the Publisher of the Year once again at this year’s ASCAP Pop Awards. The obvious strategy here is to try to use the strength of the publishing company to shore up the weakness of the recorded music division. It makes pretty good sense… on paper.
For reasons that are fathomable only to the executives that run major media companies like Universal, Warner, Sony and EMI, none of the major music companies have ever managed to create any relationship between their record companies and their associated publishing companies. There are remarkably few acts that are signed both to Warner Bros. Records and Warner Chappell, or to Sony ATV and Columbia Records. In fact, the relationship between many of these publishing companies and their affiliated labels is downright hostile. At Sony ATV, I was well-aware that many top-level A&R people at Columbia and Epic were steering their new acts to EMI Music Publishing, convinced that the artist would get more money and promotional support at that company than at Sony ATV. Likewise, EMI Music Publishing has made no secret over the years of their disdain for the hapless label that shares their name.
Some of the hostility can be attributed to executive envy, political gamesmanship, and the general corporate tendency to put one’s personal bonus ahead of the interest of the company itself. Some of it comes from the fact that many of the publishing companies and their associated labels have very different histories, areas of specialization, and financial means. To call the relationships “dysfunctional” would be something of an understatement.
Not too surprisingly, in the world of independent music companies, the idea of having a label and publishing company cooperate for the greater good has been far less elusive. In fact, many of the great success stories among independent labels have been built around the idea of record company and publishing company working together– from Motown Records and Jobete Music, to A&M Records and Almo-Irving Music, to Jive Records and Zomba Music, to Disney Records and publishing. It’s not terribly tricky. It simply means that the record label either strongly encourages or demands that their artists make a publishing deal with the related company, and likewise, the publishing company tries to keep any new talent they discover or hit songs generated by their writers “in house”, by bringing them to the associated record company.
So the idea now being put forward by Roger Faxon and the string-pullers at Terra Firma, to use EMI Music Publishing to bolster the fortunes of EMI Records, is not a crazy one, even if it’s relatively untried at a major music company level. I can almost understand how the non-music business weasels within Terra Firma could see this as the last best hope– and could have great expectations for the power of the two companies when finally brought together. It certainly won’t be the first time during their grand experiment in the music industry that Terra Firma has had their hopes dashed, though it may be the last time.
As obvious as the idea to unite the two companies sounds, it’s about ten or fifteen years too late. At this point, with EMI in such precarious condition, it’s almost impossible to see how this plays out. Most top artists with any other options would be understandably hesitant to sign to EMI Records right now, and quite frankly, it is probably not the first place that anyone from EMI Music Publishing would recommend for their artists. The publishing company needs its top writers, artists and producers to focus on creating the biggest hits possible, regardless of which label they happen to be released on.
Even if EMI Music Publishing were to encourage their top new artists to consider going to EMI Records, many are under contract with other labels for years to come, or are signed to production companies with ties to other companies, or have managers with relationships at other organizations. To create any real synergy between the two divisions is probably a five-year program, even in a best-case scenario.
Best-case scenarios have not served Terra Firma well. Indeed, the real problem with its buyout of EMI and the subsequent meltdown that followed has been a simple case of unrealistic expectations, which when unrealized, only increased the need for greater miracles in the next financial quarter. The ultimate result of this is the kind of ridiculous game of CEO musical chairs that we see now, where each new person is brought in with high hopes and a touted “turn-around” plan, only to find themselves doing a disappearing act as soon as the “turn-around” doesn’t turn out as planned. Every business should challenge its leaders to do the very best they can do. But if you challenge people to do the impossible, you will inevitably be disappointed. If you bet on them doing the impossible, you will not only be disappointed– you’ll be broke.
Terra Firma CEO Guy Hands
From the moment that Terra Firma purchased EMI in 2007 for the wildly inflated price of $4.7 billion dollars, they put themselves in a corner from which they can never escape. The loans that made that purchase possible were made on earnings expectations that were unrealistic for any music company in the present business climate, especially a company that was hardly a market leader even three years ago. In order to make the interest payments on those loans, Terra Firma now needs EMI to generate income at a level that is simply not possible for a music company in this environment.
If you try to drive a Volkswagen in the Indy 500, it won’t win the race– even if you press the gas pedal to the floor and keep it there. It’s not that it’s a bad car. It was never built to run that way. Further, if you insist on trying to do it, you’ll eventually ruin the engine– all because your expectations were not remotely in keeping with what the automobile was designed to do. EMI has plenty of talented, dedicated people in its offices around the world. It’s not inherently a bad organization. But music companies are not investment banks or oil companies. They don’t generate that level of cash. If you try to force them to do it, you’ll wind up cutting the creative experimentation you need, taking dangerous chances on high-priced “sure things”, demoralizing your staff, and draining your most productive assets to pay for your least-productive ones.
As remote as the problems of EMI might seem, the lesson of unrealistic expectations is one worth keeping in mind, even for individual songwriters and entrepreneurs entering the publishing game. As Andre de Raaff, the CEO of Imagem Music once sagely pointed out to me in a discussion about the disappointment of many investment firms who recently acquired publishing catalogs– music publishing is indeed a relatively steady business, but only over the course of about ten years.
When looked at over a decade, most established music publishing catalogs tend to hold their value and provide a relatively predictable rate of return. But within that ten year period, there can be wild swings in income from one year to the next. Currency fluctuations, copyright lawsuits, split disputes, hit songs or big flops can cause unexpected spikes or dips in the financial picture. Should you happen to buy into a catalog during the wrong three or four year period, you could easily panic when you don’t see the results you expected. If you can’t afford to wait it out for ten years, at which point the good and bad times will probably even each other out, you risk taking a sizable loss on your investment.
For those starting up a company, that means that you need to have a clear, level-headed understanding of the risks involved, the potential profits, and the time-frame in which you expect to see some action. Here are three rules to keep in mind that should help you avoid the dangers of great expectations:
1. Don’t buy anything based on what it could be.
The music business is built on dreams of endless potential. Every catalog you will ever be offered for purchase will be “full of undiscovered hits that have never been recorded!”. Every songwriter you consider signing will be on the verge of becoming the next big thing. Every cut you get will be under consideration to be the next single. None of it means anything.
Of course, all of it is possible–and hopefully one of the acts or songs you sign will turn out to be wildly successful. But you don’t do the deal based on that expectation. You negotiate the price based on what something is earning now (if it’s an established artist or catalog) or on a very conservative estimate of what it could do (for new artists or songs). You don’t plan for success. Plan for slow and steady growth, and make your financial decisions based on those plans. Then be surprised by success.
2. Don’t look for a quick money.
There isn’t any. All money in music publishing comes through the proverbial pipeline– a CD is sold at a retailer, who pays the distribution company which then pays the label which then pays Harry Fox or the equivalent which then pays the music publisher. Most of the time, that process takes somewhere between a year and a year and a half– longer than that for international royalties. Performance money is somewhat quicker, but still at least 9 months from when a song is on the radio. This is why songwriters want advances from publishers– because it’s very easy to find yourself starving, even while you’re hearing your song on the Top Forty countdown.
If you sign a new writer with an advance, no matter how minimal, it’s very unlikely that you will recoup that advance within the first year. Even if the songwriter is able to write a song in the first week of the deal, and you’re able to get the song picked up by an A&R person in the first month, it will still take three to six months for the artist to record it and release it, and another month and a half before it starts to impact at radio. It’s almost impossible that the money for that airplay or sales will show up in your coffers before the end of the first contract period. When it comes to signing and developing songwriters, you have to be willing to stay in the deal for at least a couple of years in order to get your money back.
3. Desperation is dangerous.
Decisions only get harder when you’re desperate. If you need to show results quickly, you will take foolish chances, be too aggressive, overpay for deals, or put too much pressure on the songwriters signed to you.
If you’re trying to stave off financial disaster, you’ll make budget cuts that will impair your ability to find new acts, drop unrecouped songwriters too soon, and sell off songs or catalogs at a fraction of their real value.
The music biz is a risk-taking business– but in order to take risks intelligently, you need a solid, supportive environment in which to work. That means enough capital in the business to survive while you’re waiting for your pipeline to come in, low overheads that can be covered by slow and steady growth, and enough patience and belief from your partners or investors that you are able to follow your instincts, and even make a few mistakes along the way.
A little more than a month ago, when Terra Firma was desperately trying to raise funds from its investors to stave off a Citibank takeover of EMI, they trotted out the new CEO at the time, Charles Allen, and announced that Allen would be unveiling “the new plan” to turn EMI from investment bust to boom. It was hard not to feel badly for the new leader, who was essentially being asked to create a fantasy picture in which everyone’s expectations would eventually be met, even as everyone knew that this was a completely unlikely scenario. As it turns out, he didn’t stick around long enough to even initiate the plan. And now there’s a new dream on the table.
As my father in law likes to say, you can’t teach a pig to fly. Trying will only frustrate you, and annoy the pig. Keep your expectations in line with reality, and you’ll have a far greater chance at not only meeting them, but maybe even exceeding them.