Music News Bulletin - 19/11/08

Distributor EUK Winds Down, 700 Jobs Cut
“Entertainment wholesale distributor EUK has failed to attract a buyer and the business will now be wound down by the administrators.

EUK, which was part of Woolworths Group, will continue to operate with a reduced workforce of 375 employees. Seven hundred employees were made redundant today (Dec. 12) and efforts to sell the business as a going concern will be scaled down.

EUK was placed in administration - roughly equivalent to Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. - on Nov. 27 along with Woolworths' retail business. The 800-plus stores launched a closing down sale yesterday (Dec. 12).” [BillBoard]

GEMA to join ICE
“GEMA, the German music copyright society, today confirmed that it is actively exploring opportunities to join ICE - the shared back-office service centre for collective rights organisations.

Currently ICE is a joint venture between the MCPS-PRS Alliance and the Swedish society STIM, but GEMA has been carrying out due diligence on the organisation over the past six months and this will continue with a view to GEMA potentially becoming a third partner in the venture.
GEMA’s CEO Harald Heker says a strong back-office has always provided the basis for GEMA's operations. “We believe that a potential participation in ICE, alongside the Alliance and STIM, could provide an important strategic alliance to enable a leap forward in business quality, efficiency and effectiveness."

The Alliance’s CEO Steve Porter adds, the strategic, operational and business logic behind ICE is compelling and gets stronger as new partners and customers join.” [MusicWeek]

GEMA considering joining ICE partnership
“German publishing collecting society GEMA has said it is looking into joining MCPS-PRS and Swedish collecting society STIM's ICE alliance. ICE is a shared admin centre utilised by both the UK and Swedish royalty bodies. GEMA say they have been monitoring how ICE works and the benefits it delivers to MCPS-PRS and STIM for the last six months, and its CEO, Harald Heker, has told Music Week: "We believe that a potential participation in ICE, alongside the Alliance and STIM, could provide an important strategic alliance to enable a leap forward in business quality, efficiency and effectiveness".” [CMUDaily]

EMI.COM launches
“EMI today beta launch their new website EMI.com, which is part of the major record company's attempts to forge closer connections directly with consumers. The site aims to be much more content rich than your average record label website, providing access to full track previews, videos, photos, biographies and whatnot from artists from across the EMI empire. There's also a music recommendation service which recommends artists based on your music preferences - and will make recommendations based on liking artists not signed to EMI as well as those on the label.

Although in some ways just an enhanced version of the kind of group-wide major label sites operated by Sony and Universal (and EMI, for that matter, whose now defunct The Raft website was always more content rich than most label sites), for EMI the EMI.com project is much bigger than that. Signing up and engaging consumers on a regular basis is much more part of the mix, presumably with a view to building relationships with music fans so they can sell recordings and other music-based products directly to them, circumventing, to a point, other retailers and download stores. Better direct customer relations will also strengthen EMI's offer to new artists, because they have a ready made network of profiled music fans they can promote new singings to.” [CMUDaily]