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June 2008 News

Jupiter9
in Robbie Williams and Take That

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How weird! That coma list is just odd!! :huh:
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Robbie has done a featuring with the rapper Mams Taylor, its the last song on his my space :D

 

http://www.myspace.com/mamstaylor

 

That sample is aweful...Let's hope the full song is better :(

 

But I love Mams Taylor's song LA Girls feat Joel Madden :w00t:

Not my cup of tea either, let's hope the full song is more fruitful! :unsure:
That sample is aweful...Let's hope the full song is better :(

 

But I love Mams Taylor's song LA Girls feat Joel Madden :w00t:

 

Agree LA Girls is a good track & rather cool video.... :cheer: :cheer: :cheer: the samlple sure is not great....would need to hear the full track ( if that ever happens ).....no sign of the Album it belongs to King Amongst Men....no release date even mentioned......LA Girls is on iTunes but zilch else & definately no albums........ :huh: :huh: :huh:

:manson: :manson: :manson:

 

 

 

Why the :manson: :manson: :manson: ...... :heehee: :heehee: :heehee: :heehee:

My ears are bleeding :(

 

Yeah that can happen when you're old :(

This fecking pisses me off....read this $h!te!! We need to do an email campaign against this idiot. :angry:

 

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/comment/colum...86908-20606433/

 

Jun 14 2008 John Mckie

 

THE chilling consequences of Joseph Fritzl's evil are only now emerging.

 

An insight into the long-term psychological and mental damage of 19 years in an Austrian basement suffered by his daughter Kerstin was offered by her doctor, Albert Reiter.

 

He said when she woke from her coma: "She wants very much to go to a Robbie Williams concert."

 

Dr Reiter immediately called for a full syringe of Kerstin's ears.

 

Docs played Angels on repeat for the two weeks Kerstin lay unconscious in hospital. And you thought her dad was cruel.

 

They say death and taxes are the only two things you can't avoid but Angels by Robbie Williams must come a close third.

 

In terms of preference for things you'd want to skip, it might push death and taxes into third and second place.

 

That song is on more than John Barrowman on BBC1's Saturday evening schedule.

 

It used to be Europe's favourite wedding song before it was replaced by Eric Clapton's Wonderful Tonight, a song about nicking someone else's wife.

 

In 2005, Angels was voted the best British song of the past 25 years at the Brit awards and Britain's favourite song at funerals - close to the same thing.

 

It may be about angels, or even Robbie's mum Jan but it means less to me than Vienna meant to Midge Ure.

 

It's a song that pretends to grapple with life's big issues but means nothing. Nada. Zilch.

 

The lyrics are rubbish. "I'm loving Angels instead." Of what? Most Haunted on Living TV?

 

"Do they know the places where we go where we're grey and old?" Millport?

 

"Down the waterfall wherever it may take me..." The bottom of the waterfall?

 

Utter drivel. It's the most overrated song of the past 30 years.

 

Even worse than Imagine by John Lennon, another record about nothing, pretending to be about something.

 

The success of Angels reflects Britain's growing over-sentimentality.

 

The country is now full of wild displays of emotion that make a load of noise but mean very little. Like Angels.

 

Robbie's single Rudebox has more meaningful lyrics.

 

Robbie has sung Angels a thousand times with that smirk to camera that suggests he's phoning in his performance.

 

How come so many believe in this song when he clearly doesn't?

 

Now we know even being stuck in a basement or hospital bed won't do it, there is only one way to avoid Robbie.

 

Move to America. Over there, mention Robbie Williams and they think of Mork and Mindy.

 

They're loving Charlie's Angels instead.

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Oh yes. John McKie from the Daily Ret*rd. God I hate that tabloid so much. It's a Mirror Group Newspaper of course. Say no more..... :puke2:

Edited by Jupiter9

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But on the plus side its sales have been dropping like a stone for some years now.... :cheer:
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/16/bus.../emi.php?page=2

 

After 10 months, new boss struggles with EMI

By Tim Arango Published: June 16, 2008

 

 

NEW YORK: One evening last autumn, a group of about 10 artist managers, including representatives for the pop stars Kylie Minogue and Robbie Williams as well as an executive who oversees the Beatles catalogue, clustered around a table in an executive dining room at the London headquarters of EMI. The purpose was to size up the new boss, Guy Hands, and discuss the future of the record business.

 

Hands, the private equity financier who had made a fortune sprucing up pubs in England and gas stations on the German autobahn, told the gathering that Rupert Murdoch had privately scoffed at his acquisition of EMI by saying, "MySpace is going to be the future of music, not record labels."

 

"I said I was going to prove him wrong," Hands recalled in a recent interview.

 

It has been almost 10 months since Hands, through his private equity firm Terra Firma, bought EMI for about $6.4 billion, and by several accounts, including Hands's own, it has been a chaotic time.

 

The company wobbles under a huge debt load, a leadership vacuum - it has no chief executive, and Hands makes most major decisions - and low morale among many of its employees. Hands said about 80 percent of the $6.4 billion paid for EMI was for the music publishing unit, which owns copyrights and provides a steady flow of cash.

 

 

It is the other side of the business, recorded music, that he says he overpaid for, and could wind up selling if market conditions do not improve.

 

A large restructuring, announced in January, will soon lay off 1,500 to 2,000 of EMI's roughly 5,500 employees. Most recently, the company has been negotiating the exit of Jason Flom, the chairman of Capitol Music Group who oversees recorded music in the United States.

 

By contrast, when a group of investors led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. bought the Warner Music Group in 2003 for $2.6 billion they moved quickly to restructure: the deal closed on a Monday, a restructuring plan was announced on a Tuesday, and within a month $250 million in annualized costs were slashed.

 

In many ways, EMI's pains are typical for the music industry in the past few years. But for many culturally attuned Britons, EMI is a cherished institution.

 

EMI's corporate roots stretch back to a pioneer of recorded sound, a German-born American named Emile Berliner, who founded the Gramophone Co. As a result of a merger in the 1930s, it was renamed Electric and Musical Industries Limited.

 

It was 30 years later that a man named Brian Epstein walked through the doors with a tape from a new band called the Beatles. Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones and Marvin Gaye have all called EMI home.

 

"EMI and the companies that formed it made London a center for musical culture in a way it never was," said Peter Martland, author of "EMI: The First 100 Years," and a professor at Cambridge University. "There is a lot of history there."

 

The music business, even in good times, is not welcoming to outsiders. The sensibilities of a financier like Hands are usually starkly at odds with the folkways of a creative enterprise. Artists' egos need stroking, and the measurement of success is not the same in music as it would be in running service stations along the autobahn.

 

"You have to understand the artist's psyche to make it work," said Jazz Summers, who manages the Verve, a band signed to EMI, and was present at the dinner last autumn.

 

The story has turned comical at times. After Hands discovered that some employees were laundering costs for things that were illegal (drugs and prostitutes, he said), by itemizing them on expense reports as "fruit and flowers," he set a strict travel and entertainment policy that required receipts for every expense.

 

Artists, too, have clashed more openly with Hands: The band Radiohead has fled, and the singer Joss Stone has asked to be let out of her contract. The Rolling Stones, meanwhile, have been talking with other record companies about a new label. (If the Stones left EMI, it would have little effect financially, because the company would still have the rights to the band's catalogue.)

 

"They hate him," said Hugh Hendry, a British hedge fund manager and former EMI shareholder who had publicly criticized past management, of artists' opinions about Hands. "He's rude. He's abrasive. He wants to make money. He's the first to say to artists, 'We are not going to pay you too much money. Now get out of my office."'

 

A glance at Hands's résumé is enough to suggest a clash of cultures. Hands, 49, is an Oxford-educated financier - stints at Goldman Sachs and Nomura made him rich before he founded Terra Firma in 2002 - and he and his wife own and run a chain of country house-style hotels.

 

Hands was ranked No. 12 on the Times of London's list of 100 most influential figures in British business and has a reputation for being outspoken. (When cheap credit dried up, he called investment bankers "whimpering dogs," The Times of London reported.)

 

Terra Firma's portfolio of 25 companies ranges across industries, from a landfill operator to a betting shop to a company that leases jet airplanes. Hands retained the earlier management in just one of the 25, William Hill, which runs sports betting outlets.

 

So when he took over at EMI he entered a culture that none of his earlier experience had prepared him for. "It was like we had unlocked years of internal battles with a psychotherapy session," he said. "It was extraordinary."

 

At first managers gave Hands the benefit of the doubt - they had seen their business decline and were desperate for a new approach.

 

"He said, 'This is what I do,"' Summers said. "'I took over failed pubs, and it worked. I took over failed service stations in Germany, and it worked. We put in new toilets.' At first, I thought he was bright."

 

But according to Hands, the company was doing worse than commonly thought. An analysis by McKinsey and KPMG found that EMI had lost £750 million, or $1.5 billion, from selling new music over the last five years.

 

"We didn't believe it at first," he said, explaining that the figures that EMI previously reported counted sales of rereleases of music from old acts like the Beatles as new music revenue.

 

"They were doing everything they could to hide the fact that they were losing huge amounts of money in new music," he said. "The good news was they were making a fortune in catalogue."

 

So far this year, EMI's market share in the United States has declined to 8.8 percent from 10.7 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the largest drop among the four major music companies. An album from its top-selling band Coldplay will be out Tuesday, and robust sales could polish EMI's image.

 

But even this would belie tension within the company, as Coldplay agreed to release the album only on the condition that EMI pay for the band's management to hire its own marketing and publicity team, rather than rely on EMI employees.

 

For EMI, the news became a little worse as the credit crisis grew.

 

Last year Citigroup, which also advised EMI's previous board in the sale, lent Terra Firma nearly $5 billion to finance the deal. The timing couldn't have been worse for the investment bank. "The loan was done at the very end of the credit boom," Hands said.

 

As a result, Citigroup has been unable to syndicate the debt, giving Citigroup leverage over EMI should the company start hemorrhaging money. If the debt were spread among numerous investors, EMI would have more breathing room.

 

In a recent letter to his investors, Hands wrote: "Clearly, this is a time when all banks are under tremendous pressure, but this is not ideal for EMI. In all leveraged buyouts, your bank is your partner, and we have worked hard, and continue to work hard, to see if there are ways to help Citigroup syndicate or sell down this loan."

 

To keep costs down, Hands has clamped down on expenses while he has waited - the company is still waiting - for widespread layoffs. But despite those measures, the company will not meet a cash-flow target as part of its covenants with its lender Citigroup. So he negotiated a three-month extension.

 

For now, Hands is trying to fix EMI's business so that its fate remains in his control rather than Citigroup's. "It's going to take a lot less arrogance and a lot more honesty," he said. "It's going to take a new direction, new management and change."

 

 

:manson: :manson: :manson:

 

 

Is it the death knell for the big music labels.....if I was an EMI shareholder I would be feeling very nervous right now...I think for Mr Hands the purchase of EMI may have been very bad timing..the big mobile phone companies are waiting in the wings & are only too happy to cover the cost of touring etc for the big named artists like Coldplay , Madonna , Robbie & others....it is impossible now for an artist to make a living from just album sales alone as illegal downloads have put paid to that & nothing can be done to stop it.... EMI is just on a face saving excercise with their shareholders & lenders at the moment with their massive push on Coldplays album.....I think it is too little too late...

 

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http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7011299007

 

 

Robbie Williams Searching For Aliens

 

 

June 17, 2008 10:04 a.m. EST

 

 

 

Joanna Mazewski - Celebrity News Service Editor

Hollywood, CA (BANG) - Robbie Williams has started camping in a bid to spot a UFO.

 

The 'Angels' singer - who is fascinated with aliens - has purchased a tent, sleeping bag, cooking gear and survival equipment so he can sleep under the Californian stars in the hope of seeing an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

 

A source close to the star - who lives in Los Angeles - told Britain's The Sun newspaper: "Robbie has been taking pals out to the woods for long weekends. He wants to live like a cowboy in a Western. He also has a fascination with UFOs and thinks he has more chance of seeing one away from Los Angeles' bright lights."

 

Earlier this year, it was claimed Robbie was planning to splash out $5 million on an alien observatory after spending all his free time visiting Arizona's National Optical Astronomy Observatory, in Tucson.

 

A source said: "He is leading a bizarre existence at the moment, vanishing into the desert to look at starts in far-flung galaxies. He is dead set on buying himself an observatory in the desert, which can cost up to $5 million. He is hooked on all things from outer space."

 

Robbie - whose 2006 'Close Encounters World Tour' was alien-themed - has previously claimed he has been visited by spaceships on three occasions.

 

Describing one close encounter of the third kind, he said: "I was lying on my sun lounger outside at night. Above me was a square thing that passed over my head slightly and shot off."

 

 

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