Capitol Records To Be Run By A Supercomputer Named HAL

Guy Hands and his Terra Firma pals have already shown an odd hand toward running EMI, but if Roger Friedman is to be believed (and feel free to be skeptical), their boldest experiment yet is on its way.

According to Roger’s morning dispatch, both Lee Trink and Jason Flom are losing their jobs at the Capitol Music Group, although Friedman manages to botch their job titles, so who knows. Either way, if the story is true, Hands plans to try running the label without actual executives at all.

Neither Trink nor Flom will be replaced. Guy Hands and the folks from Terra Firma, the new owners of EMI who have no experience in the record business, don’t believe in label presidents.

This means that as Coldplay — the group headed by Gwyneth Paltrow’s husband, Chris Martin — releases “Viva La Vida,” the biggest album of its career, its American record label will have no one running it. This also means that the Beatles will have no one directly representing them. Neither will Katy Perry, who has the No. 1 single in the country with “I Kissed a Girl,” or any other Capitol acts.

And the funny part is that none of them knows it. As of Monday morning, no one from EMI had bothered to call the people representing any of those acts to tell them the news. They even left the Beatles’ Apple Records out of the loop. The Beatles catalog, which is not available for official downloading anywhere, still sells millions of CDs for Capitol.

This is the way I am told all the EMI labels will be run. Nick Gatfield is coming in to take over as “president of A&R labels for North America and the U.K.” for all of EMI. But the individual labels will not have presidents. They will have “A&R presidents” and heads of marketing.

Possibly why none of the Capitol divisions haven’t been informed is because the move isn’t really happening, but even the idea that a label would go without actual presidents, especially after hiring a musically indifferent virtual-world bubble veteran yesterday, is a boldly ridiculous move. Maybe that sort of crazy talk is exactly what EMI needs to survive! Have Apple Martin run the company, or possibly some trained monkeys in Katy Perry t-shirts. It’s a bold new world of possibilities when you’ve given up on reason.

Coldplay, Beatles Lose Leader [Fox News]