The EMI Group is a music company that is owned by Terra Firma Capital Partners.  Terra purchased EMI for £3.2 billion around August 2007.  EMI recently signed with MySpace Music to have their music distributed through the social network.  EMI used to represent Paul McCartney, Radiohead, and The Rolling Stones, but all of those artists have left since. 

As EMI’s market share is declining and they had to cut almost 50% of their work force, they are trying a new experiment on the Internet.  EMI also wants to launch an online music distribution service of their own.  Why?  Because they want to gather data on their customers.  At the end of the day, everyone wants to become a microcosm of Amazon.com.  They’ve been using the streaming/download digital music download model for years before even iTunes existed.

The leader behind EMI’s efforts for digital music downloads through their own service is Douglas Merrill.  Merill came to EMI as the President as the former CIO of Google.

EMI currently represents artists such as Lily Allen, The Beach Boys, Beastie Boys, The Beatles, Coldplay, The Chemical Brothers, Duran Duran, Daft Punk, Dem Franchize Boyz, Norah Jones, Lenny Kravitz, The Kooks, Moby, Liz Phair, Spice Girls, Switchfoot, Keith Urban, Robbie Williams, and Yellowcard.