Terra Firma, the private equity fund that owns EMI Music Group, has brought in a new CEO for the music label. Elio Leoni-Sceti is out; Charles Allen, the former CEO of British broadcaster ITV replaces him.

Leoni-Sceti came to the company in July 2008, a move that raised plenty of eyebrows since he had zero experience in the music business — his background was marketing packaged goods like Woolite and French’s Mustard.

But in retrospect it doesn’t really matter who Terra Firma brought in to run the company — the investment group’s big mistake was paying too much for EMI, using too much debt, in 2007.

At this point the real question for EMI isn’t who runs it, but who owns it. There’s a decent chance that Terra Firma will breach a banking covenant in the coming months and that control of EMI will go to Citigroup (C), which owns most of the label’s debt.

The conventional wisdom is that part or all of EMI will end up in the hands of longtime Warner Music Group (WMG) sooner or later.

Read full release:

Read more »

(Associated Press) Pink Floyd has begun legal action against EMI Group over the way royalty payments are calculated in the digital era.

The group’s lawyer, Robert Howe, told the High Court in London that the band was disputing the way royalties for online sales are worked out.

He said the group also wants a ruling on whether EMI can sell tracks “unbundled” from their original albums.

Howe said the band’s contract prohibits selling tracks “otherwise than in the original configuration of the Pink Floyd albums.” EMI claims the rule applies only to physical albums, not the Internet.

Pink Floyd signed with EMI in 1967 and became one of its most lucrative acts.

Guns N’ Roses will play three private shows in Brazil and Argentina during the band’s current tour of South America, the organizer said.

The shows are set for undisclosed locations in Sao Paulo on Thursday (March 11) and Buenos Aires on March 20. Plans are also in the works for a show in Rio De Janeiro.

Organizer Jamison Ernest said each venue will hold about 150 people. He declined to reveal too much information for fear of riots by uninvited guests. He will co-host the Sao Paulo show with Brazilian model Ana Beatriz Barros.

The 11-date tour, the band’s first trek around the continent since its heyday in 1992, began on Sunday in Brasilia. Dates are on tap through April 1 in Quito, Ecuador. The band will also play Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Venezuela and Colombia.

Ernest, a friend of Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose, also runs a clothing company and has a band, both named Yellow Fever. Guns N’ Roses previously played three secret shows, two in New York City and one in London.

Rose and his new crop of bandmates were last in Brazil to play the Rock in Rio festival in January 2001.

Put.io describes itself as ‘online storage re-imagined’, allowing users to upload their files and then access them from any device with a browser, including smartphones and games consoles.

But here’s the thing: “We can fetch files from the bittorrent network. We also support ftp’s, direct download links, rapidshare links, basic http authenticated links”. Or, to put that another way: it can download an entire movie in five minutes and store it in your locker, ready to stream to your browser, media player or mobile device.

It’s exactly this kind of service that’s likely to cloud (ahem) the thinking when politicians are trying to draft legislation. Uploading someone’s own content to stream to their various devices is one thing, but bundling that service with the ability to fetch files from BitTorrent and Rapidshare is guaranteed to stoke the ire of the creative industries.

Put.io is in private beta. Expect to hear more about it in the months to come…

As Billboard previously reported, Blake Shelton’s new release, “Hillbilly Bone“, a six-song mini-album, hits stores today. USA Today is taking note of the uptick in country mini-albums (or EPs, or collections that generally have fewer than ten songs). Luke Bryan, the newspaper points out, released his second “Spring Break” digital EP today. And “country’s Josh Thompson and American Idol’s Jason Castro have released digital EPs in anticipation of full albums.”

Shelton’s six-song CD, which Warner Nashville will put in physical retailers, represents a far greater leap of faith and a bigger shift in strategy than a digital-only release. Not all albums will be shortened to six songs, but expect to see more mini-albums on store shelves as labels and retailers try to find ways to offer music at lower prices.

This mini-album experiment could help fix two problems. First, it could help keep record labels on the store shelves on retailers wary of falling CD sales. Second, cheaper albums will probably do more to lure buyers who would have otherwise bought a single track. The current gap between track and album is about $7.70 – a $9.99 digital album price minus $1.29 track price. At iTunes, Shelton’s Hillybilly Bone costs $5.99 while each track costs $1.29. That’s a difference of $4.70. If the price gap is reduced to the $4 to $5 range, labels may be better able to convert track buyers to album buyers.

A look at the numbers show the mini-album idea has potential. If Shelton released two $5.99 mini-albums instead of one $9.99 album, Warner Nashville will have to sell 167 combined units of the two mini-albums for every 100 units of full album sales to break even. (Wholesale costs for digital product, not physical, were used in those quick calculations.) That’s very doable, especially if the lower price point causes the track-to-album conversion rate to improve. On the expense side, however, labels will experience greater expense in putting out two releases instead of one. But even considering the higher expenses, and even if the 167/100 ratio is not reached, mini-albums could help labels achieve the incalculable benefit of keeping the Walmarts of the world interested in their music.

Billboard.biz

The U.K.’s V Festival will marks its 15th anniversary with headline sets from Kings of Leon and U.K. rock act Kasabian in 2010.

The festival is sponsored by Virgin Media and staged on two sites – at Hylands Park Chemlsford, Essex and Weston Park, Staffordshire near Birmingham – on Aug. 21-22.

Other acts confirmed so far include Stereophonics, Faithless, the Prodigy, David Guetta, Pet Shop Boys, Cheryl Cole, Paul Weller, the Kooks, Paolo Nutini, and Florence And The Machine.

Tickets go on sale at 9am on March 5.

Billboard.biz

The studio, where the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin recorded some of their most famous tracks, has been sold for around £3.5m to a businessman who is considering a number of options for the site including opening a cinema.

EMI’s decision to sell Olympic, in Barnes, south-west London, comes days after the troubled music group U-turned on a decision to sell Abbey Road studios after public outcry over the future ownership of the site where the Beatles recorded most of their records.

Sources close to EMI said the group decided to sell Olympic after ending recordings at the loss-making studio last year. Best-selling Irish rock band U2 recorded its last album No Line On The Horizon there as recently as December 2008.

Previous to that the site has hosted numerous rock and pop acts as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice who recorded their rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar there.

The studio mothballed the studio last year.

The Rolling Stones were one of the first bands to use the studio after it was opened in 1966, laying down tracks for the album Between The Buttons and then recording their next six albums including Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers there. Led Zeppelin recorded their first album there in 1968, and followed it with tracks for all their albums until 1975. In the 1980s Duran Duran, Roxy Music and Spandau Ballet also used the studio.

The BBC has confirmed to staff that it plans to close modern rock digital radio station 6 Music, following a strategic review of the BBC’s digital services.

The review, titled “Putting Quality First,” will be officially unveiled by director-general Mark Thompson at a press conference at BBC Television Centre later today (March 2). The announcement was brought forward following a leak of the proposals last week.

The proposals in the digital strategy review will be considered by management and the BBC Trust, its governing body, before getting the go-ahead.

It also includes a plan to close the Asian Network, a speech and music station billed as the “sound of Asian Britain,” as well as cutting spending on the corporation’s Web sites.

The Swedish rock band Bob Hund released their single Fantastiskt (fantastic) as a one copy vinyl record that only allows 30 playings. The record was placed on a turntable with the lyrics etched on the turntable lid. It sold on eBay for US $3,650 and became the most expensive record ever sold in Sweden.

LovelyPackage.com

(Billboard.Biz) Songs and bundles worth €112 million ($152 million) were downloaded onto computers in Germany in 2009, an increase of 40% over the previous year.

The data is from a survey conducted by market research institute GfK in Nuremberg on behalf of the German Federal Association of Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM) in Berlin.

“The market for downloaded music is booming more than expected,” comments BITKOM vice president Achim Berg in Berlin. “This market is impervious to the effects of the economic crisis. We forecast further strong growth in 2010. More and more people are preferring the convenience of using their PCs to select the music they want to hear.”

Volumes also rose last year, with German consumers downloading 51 million tracks or albums in 2009, an increase of 27% over 2008.

Men constitute 63% and women 37% of the customers. At the same time, the proportion of consumers aged over 30 increased by four percentage points to 57 percent.

“Paid music downloads are no longer the domain of young users but are growing in popularity in older age groups in particular,” says Berg.

Downloaded individual tracks cost an average of €1.08 ($1.46). Three years ago, it cost €1.14 ($1.55) to download a track.

“The trend towards mobile utilization of the Internet offers new market opportunities for providers of multimedia content,” explains Berg.

BITKOM represents more than 1,300 companies and is the voice of the information technology, telecommunications, and new media industry in Germany with 950 direct members.