Recording Lable - EMI

EMI is a British multinational music company, also known as EMI Music but more often simple EMI. EMI was one of the ‘big six’ record companies alongside; Warner Music Group, Sony Music, BMMG Music, Universal Music Group and Polygram. Over the years it’s faced a wave of new record companies from the US predominantly; however it’s still managed to retain its prestige. EMI is a member of the RIAA & IFPI. Sadly in February 2011 EMI became mostly owned by Citygroup which took the then financially troubled company over because of more than $4 billion in debt it held. As such Citygroup began to sell of pieces of EMI to other companies for example $1.9 billion of music arms went to Vivendi’s Universal Music Group and around $2.2 million going to Sony/ATV consortium. Nonethelss EMI is still one of the worlds leading music companies and is home to some of the most successful and best known recording artist from past and present. Some examples are: Gorillaz, Snoop Dogg, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Pink Floyd, Katy Perry, Empire of the Sun (AUSTRALIA), Hikaru Utada (JAPAN), Beastie Boys and The Beatles to name a few…

Along with signing artists EMI provides a global menu of commercial services such as digital and physical distribution, sales, press and promotion, marketing, licensing, synch, brand partnership, live recordings and merchandising. EMI’s history has been tracked back to be one of the original companies founded by the inventor of the gramophone, Emile Berliner. Since then EMI has been at the front of technical development in music and its changes. People who have worked within EMI in history have been behind the birth of electrical television and radar.

Given our heritage of innovation, when digital music began to take off in the 1990s, EMI was well placed to respond to the new trends. EMI Music’s first websites went live in 1993 and 1994 and in 1998 EMI streamed the first complete album over the internet, ‘Mezzanine’ by Massive Attack. The following year EMI was the first company to release a digital album download, David Bowie’s ‘…Hours’. EMI also launched the first internet video single in 2001. In 2007 EMI was the first major music company to make its music available without digital rights management (DRM) software.

In 2009 Coldplay became the first recording artists to sell more than one million digital albums in the US and two million worldwide and this year we launched OpenEMI to engage directly with the tech developer community around the world with initiatives such as creating a platform with The Echo Nest for developers to access EMI Music tracks and content to create innovative and exciting new apps and digital music concepts for EMI’s artists. 

http://www.emimusic.com/