1 Mil Unsold Copies Of Robbie Williams' Rudebox Recycled In China Weakens His EMI Threats

To add to the conversation that davesonic started in his post today about EMI, Guy Hands and the label's musicians, here is another perspective of the music industry - one that many people don't like to discuss. Guy Hands, the "plantation owner" at the head of Terra Firma (the corp that recently purchased EMI), revealed some disturbing stats about the label's album releases to The Guardian. Hands told the UK paper that "Roughly 85 per cent of what EMI does get to release never makes a profit, in part because of the cash spent signing bands and partly due to ill-made bets on the number of CDs the market requires for particular acts." 85%? Surely he's trying to justify the extreme changes being made at the littlest Big 4 label. Changes that have garnered international press and threats of boycotts and protests from fans and artists alike. Robbie Williams is at the top of this list, stating that he will withhold his new album, despite an £80 million contract to deliver. Hands, not surprisingly, isn't too concerned however. According to an report on NME, 1 million copies of Williams' last album Rudebox are still not sold and are on their way to China to be crushed, recycled, and used to resurface roads or be transformed into street lighting. China gets free plastic by the ton while Hands focuses on the label's "profitable" artists. According to davesonic's post from the Times Online, that would be EMI's back-catalog of music "including the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Iron Maiden and David Bowie."Some of Hands' ideas seem like sound business practices, while others sound like the owner of a "vanity purchase" as Williams' manager called it when he described Hands as behaving like a "plantation owner".This waste of the final product is not new or uncommon. Sometimes, millions of copies of one album will be left to rot or be recycled in China, India, or wherever it was pressed due to some bureaucratic or artistic difference that emerges after the album is produced. (Iron Maiden or Nile or some other metal band had the entire production of their album shipped to India to be destroyed because of its lyrical content, after a full release was produced and packaged for distribution!) This is one of the major reasons why a digital music industry is better for the planet (even though I still cherish my small-run vinyl records). Other reasons include the reduction of emissions from global shipping, reduction of toxic chemicals in CD production, etc.Read more in davesonic's post and NME.com