We’re probably some of the last to notice it here, but 64-year-old Sir Paul McCartney has upped sticks and joined the digital music revolution.
He has left EMI after 45 years and gone to Starbucks’ Hear Music label as its first major signing. Yes, Memory Almost Full, McCartney’s 21st studio album since the Beatles, can be found nestling temptingly alongside the biscotti. As McCartney explained recently to the LA Times:-
I was bored with the old record company’s jaded view…They’re very confused, and they will admit it themselves: that this is a new world, and they’re a little bit at a loss as to what to do. So they’ve got millions of dollars and X budget … for them to come up with boring ways — because they’ve been at it for so long — to what they call ‘market’ it. And I find that all a bit disturbing.
McCartney went on to say that writing, playing and recording albums is all fun, but the interfacing with the record company guys is much less inspiring. [Perhaps they could do with a dose of what Prof Scott Page calls diverse perspectives -- see our earlier post on his book, The Difference.]
My record producer [David Kahne] said the major record labels these days are like dinosaurs sitting around discussing the asteroid. They know it’s going to hit. They don’t know when, they don’t know where it’s coming from. But it’s sort of hit already. With iTunes, and all of that.”
‘Dance Tonight’, McCartney’s latest single, made its worldwide video premier on YouTube.com last month (see below) and is the first of his solo recordings to arrive simultaneously as a download on iTunes. The rest of his solo catalogue will follow over the next few months. McCartney also granted one of just a handful of pre-release interviews to indie-rock site Pitchforkmedia.com, and played to 700 delighted fans in NY City last night at a free, last-minute concert, arranged via a fansite – all further evidence of McCartney’s enthusiasm to embrace the new.
From the Knackered perspective, it will be an interesting test of private equity to see if EMI becomes a more innovative company (in Macca’s terms) if taken over, as anticipated, by Terra Firma Capital Partners. As a listed company, its executives are inevitably focused on the short term requirements of producing smoothly rising profits to satisfy financial analysts. They have manifestly failed in that endeavour. Macca and the Beatles represent perhaps the archetypal creative black swan, and any quarterly forecast will have difficulty accounting for them.
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