Check out the full interview with Vice Chairman of EMI David Munns. Here is an excerpt below.
On Breaking a ‘new’ artist………..
Munns: Back in the early ’70s, you put a single out, and then you worked it. Maybe three weeks later Radio 1 added it or Radio 3 in Holland, and a few weeks later maybe it became a hit. Now, you work it and then you put it out. You go on the road, you build up a fan base, you get a MySpace page. You do this and you do that. Then you’ll get some radio play, maybe. Radio is starting to use the Internet as a sort of research program as well. You’re working those taste-making communities and trying to get to some attention there. You don’t go to radio straightaway. And then when you’ve got your record somewhere up the chart, you come with your album. It certainly used to be the other way around.

On Myspace…….
Munns: We look at all of those (social networks), and then we start to get to a picture. It’s allowing you to see the consumer directly, consumer response directly, the good and bad. So the marketing techniques are switching from sort of mass market to a more fragmented approach. Not every artist we have “works,” and not every record we have “works,” so it’s enabling us sometimes to find out more what the consumer and the taste-makers think about our music before we spend a lot of money. That in itself it will act like some kind of filter. But the reason we love this business is (that) you don’t know. You can play me a record that I think is absolutely the most wonderful thing in the world, and it won’t sell a copy. And you can play me a record I think is crap, and it’ll sell a million. Do we have some idea that we’ve got people who are good? Sure, but it’s not an exact science.

On Radio……..
Munns: I think radio is still pretty important. But in some countries, it has got itself too narrow-cast, and it’s too worried about what the other guy is doing. Some radio stations, some radio programs are better than others on that front… They’re migrating some listeners to satellite or digital radio or online radio, which is perhaps even more adventurous, but still radio and its concept isn’t going to go away.

On the Singles Business…..
Munns: The singles market and the album markets coexisted very comfortably all through my life. So the concept of the single, hearing your track in isolation on the radio, buying a track on its own, taking a track off YouTube–the concept of the track business has always been there…There’s nothing wrong in an artist having a huge hit all around the world and not repeating it