Summary: In 2007 private equity firm Terra Firma borrowed a lot of money from Citibank to buy EMI, the UK’s most venerable music company. Their plan was to transform this most traditional of companies to meet the challenges of a new age. A year later the economic crash came along to make what was already a difficult job even harder. Eamonn Forde covered what was going on at EMI for The Word as the smart guys from the city tried to grapple with the idiosyncrasies of a business which is strangely touchy-feely and utterly unscientific. And now that the Terra Firma misadventure is over and EMI has been divided up among the other major comglomerates he’s brought it together into The Final Days Of EMI: Selling The Pig, a uniquely authoritative insider account of an industry that was losing an empire and was yet to find a role. He came along to Word In Your Ear to talk about it.
