LONDON - EMI is to be one of the six “most recognizable and influential brands” featured in a new BBC documentary series called “…And Me,” that will be televised over the coming weeks.

  The series examines brands like, EMI, Marks and Spencers and Ford and attempts to show their effects on the British culture and also how the UK has changed the way they have had to operate.

  The screening date for the EMI segment is set for November 27th on BBC2.

• BBC’s “…And Me” series

LONDON - The Guardian has recently published an article on EMI UK and its future. In this article, published September 6th, it mentions that Roxette has the potential of being one of EMI’s biggest artists for the forthcoming year.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The pop music biz has developed a nagging headache, and it’s not going away. So claims Mark Jenkins, who reviews music and film for the Washington Post and National Public Radio. His commentary was published this week in “Slate,” an e-zine that’s now part of MSN.

  TDR reader Sheba Agarwal (Kachina008), who recently recently returned to Europe after living in the U.S., found Jenkin’s viewpoint interesting and suggested our subscribers might like to read his column. While much of what Jenkins has to say was written for a U.S. audience, we agree with Sheba that his perspective on the state of the music industry will be of interest to our readers worldwide.

  Simply click on the link below, read the article on MSN, and then use your browser’s back button to return to The Daily Roxette.

• Hit Charade: Slate column by Mark Jenkins (Hit back button to return to TDR)

EMI, one of the world’s big five record companies, has seen profits slide 40% in what it termed a “challenging year”. The company, home to Roxette and other artists such as Kylie Minogue and Robbie Williams, has been beset by falling sales and piracy problems like the rest of the music business. According to BBC News, the company has also made its own mistakes, “including heavy debts, underperforming artists, and a £38m bill for extricating itself from a massive long-term deal with Mariah Carey.”

  In March, we reported about EMI’s plans to cut 1,800 jobs.

• BBC News article

LONDON - EMI Recorded Music has acquired Mute, one of Europe’s leading independent record companies, extending an existing licensing relationship that Mute has had with EMI’s Virgin Records for over 15 years.

  Founded in London in 1978 by Daniel Miller, Mute has consistently been at the forefront of artist development with an artist roster that includes Moby and Depeche Mode - whose last albums sold 8 million and 2 million each respectively. The acquisition includes Mute’s catalogue and its operations in the UK, US and Germany.

NEW YORK - EMI will ax 1,800 staffers worldwide — nearly 20% of its work force — has cast off a quarter of its 1,600 artists, and will take more than $340 million in charges in an aggressive bid to return the stumbling British music group to fighting form.

  The drastic cost-cutting actions, announced last Wednesday by EMI Recorded Music chief Alain Levy at a conference for investors in London, are the culmination of a worldwide evaluation of EMI’s operations initiated when he took over the company six months ago.

  Levy said half of the 1,800 job cuts have already happened or will happen by the end of the month, while the other half will be completed by the end of September. Roughly 400 of the layoffs will come from the U.S. operation, where EMI has languished in last place among the five majors and its key labels, Capitol and Virgin, have struggled to generate new hits for the better part of a decade.

  Levy said almost half the planned $140 million in annual cost savings will come from the North America region because salaries and operating overhead are far higher here than in other territories.

  “This is not just a cost-cutting exercise,” Levy said at the conference, also attended by chairman Eric Nicoli and EMI division chiefs from around the globe. “This is reshaping EMI for the future and positioning it for growth with a much lower cost base.”

— This article by Justin Oppelaar and Erich Boehm.

LONDON - Roxette’s forthcoming releases won’t be on the EMI-branded label anymore. The UK-based EMI Group is streamlining its company structure and as a result, one of its labels, EMI Records, will be renamed Capitol. EMI Group’s other labels, including Virgin and EMI Classics, will keep their old name and brand.

  Another part of the restructuring is that all local EMI offices will start using a similar organization chart, with a single managing director and externalized back-office operations.

NEW YORK - Pressplay, which offers music from three of the five major labels, launched its online subscription service on Tuesday. The launch came on the same day that MusicCity – one of three file-sharing companies hoping to spoil the major labels’ party – asked a U.S. federal court to declare its free service legal.

  Pressplay – which offers songs from Sony, EMI and Universal artists – is the second fee-based service released by the five major record labels. MusicNet – run by EMI, Warner and BMG – launched in December (previous TDR article).

  Pressplay will be available through affiliates MP3.com, Roxio, Yahoo and MSN. Read more…

Dutch consumer electronics manufacturer Philips, a co-creator of the CD format, is not playing along as major record labels unveil their copy-protection technology for CDs. Philips owns the “Compact Disc” trademark and the CD logo that has been on every disc since Philips and Sony jointly developed the technology in 1978. Now Philips says that as the copy-protected CDs can’t be played on some CD players, such as CD-ROM drives and even some standard stereo systems, the protected discs do not qualify as “compact discs” and thus can’t use the CD logo.

  The copy protection has been introduced by the five major record labels: BMG Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Recorded Music and Warner Music Group. The controversial technology introduces minute errors to the CDs or changes the location of data on the discs to prevent them from being played back on computers.

  So far, only a couple of discs have been copy-protected with this technology. Natalie Imbruglia’s album “White Lilies Island” from BMG prompted numerous returns in the United Kingdom as record buyers thought their discs were broken.

• Reuters article at News.com

STOCKHOLM - The Swedish “Grammi” nominations are out. But the Swedes’ favorite artists have been totally ignored by the jury. Now, Sweden’s best selling artists might be “no shows” at the event.

  Roxette, Patrik Isaksson, Excellence, Uno Sveningsson, E-type, Vikingarna, Shebang, Real Group, Lambretta, Barbados och Markoolio.

  They had some of the biggest hits last year in Sweden. Together, they sold well over 1 million albums and singles. But according to the Grammis jury, they don’t exist.

  Some of these artists have indicated they plan to stay away from the Grammis gala on February 14th in the Globe in Stockholm.

  Nutta Hultman, project leader for the Swedish branch of IFPI, the organization behind the Grammis, says that the Grammis purpuse is to stimulate quality and creativity in the Swedish music scene.

Expressen reporter Andreas Nordström asked, “Does this mean that the Swedish people have a poor taste in music?”

  “What makes the Grammis one of the most important prizes is the it draws attention to those artists that doen’t get much space normally in the media,” she answered.

• Expressen’s article (In Swedish)