EMI, one of the global music majors, is shutting down some of its offices in Asia. Offices in Thailand and Singapore have already been shuttered, while regional headquarters in Hong King are ready for the grim reaper, Music 2.0 reports.
All of this is part of the right-sizing moves EMI has been making; it had earlier announced plans to cut thousands of jobs worldwide. The big cuts in the region are going to come in June, Music 2.0 Blog asserts. It also offers up an in-depth analysis of how global music companies blew the big Asian opportunity: ringtones.
EMI’s move makes me wonder how long before the other three music labels — Warner, Universal and Sony-BMG — follow suit. EMI over the past few years has become the canary in the coal mine: It’s not the biggest of the music majors, and as a result, has been open to take more draconian measures to survive the music industry meltdown. Whether it was signing up for DRM-free music or ruthlessly cutting its payroll, EMI has been ahead of the curve, only to see its bigger brethren follow suit.
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12:01 AM PT
[...] Read the rest of this post Print all_things_di220:http://voices.allthingsd.com/20080414/malik/ Sphere Comment Tagged: GigaOm, Asia, EMI, Om Malik, Voices, music | permalink [...]
12:29 AM PT
[...] Giga has a nice post today informing us about EMI’s decision to cut back its Asia pressence. Om Malik thinks it gives us a clue to what will happen next with the other biggies (??) in the “incredibly shrinking” music business. Thanks Om! [...]
4 comments so far
7:29 PM PT
I want to buy digital music here in South East Asia. I resort to buying Japanese iTunes pre-paid card and using it to download music. I have seen people buying iTunes cards in Thailand and Indonesia. That means there is some demand for digital downloads.
12:09 AM PT
good. may be they will sell Saregama to their fans. I am tired of paying full prices for badly produced vinyl rips or straight from film track without any labor and charge full price when they no royalty payment for long dead md and lyrcists and singers.
9:29 AM PT
Music industry can only shrink. They have enjoyed such a huge over-price over previous decades, due to the constraints of physical distribution -CD/vinyls cost, scarce shelf space-, that they can only shrink now. Labels used to control the distribution and were the ones deciding what would be the hits. Now Internet, mp3 and the low cost to produce content have liberated Music from the tyranny of the labels. That means potentially a bigger share of (smaller) revenues to artists, and huge variety and choice for the user.
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5:33 AM PT
CD sales fall for the last few years so as other commenters have mentioned downsizing would sooner or later happen. The music industry has lost historic opportunities to modernise and instead chose to fight to end in order to retain the CD model of distribution. In the meantime it did nothing to keep its customers. Prices have remained extremely high and to say the truth I found that music quality in the last few years has suffered considerably.
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