Who Is EMI Group PLC?

1.What are conversion factors? Why were conversion factors developed? How do they impact on which bond is cheapest to deliver? Under what conditions would there be no cheapest to deliver? Explain in detail.

1.1Summarise the development of the UK popular music recording industry from the 1950’s to the present day.

Emusic. EMusic’s success results from much more than just selling music, it’s what and how they use technology to get their customer 's attention to meet their needs. Their relationship with their customers is based on a customer-focused marketing strategy. By trying and targeting their customers, eMusic use digital music service for independent-minded music collectors to satisfy online customer experiences. The thing that eMusic use to drives genuine value for their customer’s music is focusing on the independent-minded music lovers and collectors. The ‘Independents’ are defined by certain behaviors. Their musical tastes are more offbeat, as opposed to mainstream. They are also more passionate about music overall and are always actively seeking out music that’s new to them. 71% of the ‘Independents’ purchase digital music files online to own (Business Wire, 2011, p 1).

The music industry is an oligopoly. Since the late 1800’s people like Thomas Edison have been buying up patents in communication technology, forming monopolies, leading to a non-competitive entertainment industry. With only a handful of corporations controlling all aspects of acquisition, distribution and marketing of music, harsh business principles create an exploitative industry that takes the best of what artists have to offer and leaves many of them unable to support themselves. Beginning in the 1950’s with payola and white cover music and ultimately evolving into iTunes and Spotify, the music industry has grown into a billion dollar industry with far-reaching influence and control. Contracts rarely serve the artists’ best interest and many are left out to dry when their usefulness has expired.

We are providing below the assumptions and other calculations we used while computing the WACC and the cash flows.

The world market of record music in 1990s was dominated by only five big corporations: BMG Entertainment, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group. The majors could maintain their status thanks to patents and agreements, technological improvements and M&As. The majors had the complete control of patents and music rights from the artists. Even though the artists tried to directly contact to the customers, they could not afford the attempt. Thus, they relied on the professional signers and on the publishing company. The

EMI must implement new measures to increase its market share. It can also decrease its CD prices to compete with Universal Records. EMI has less market share because it has less hit recording artists and a smaller music catalog. EMI has several options to increase its prominence in the record industry. One of these solutions is for EMI to change its marketing mix. EMI can consider changing its product mix by offering more music geared toward group of people who have steadily increased the percentage of music they buy for the past ten years; consumers over the age of 40 (Kerin,2007). EMI can also cut cost involved with artists by dropping artists that do not produce, supply the market with high quality artists and increasing productivity. This in turn will also increase its market share. And of course, EMI can decrease the price of its CD's.

The popular music industry in the late 1990s was dominated by a small number of integrated corporations with headquarters in Europe, the United States and Japan. This music market starts simply with an artist and moves along through many steps to the consumer. Everything has its start when a musician presents his music to a music manager, and if he/she finds the music promising, a contract is signed between the two, recordings are made and a marketing plan is drafted for the

Shift retail distribution from specialty stores to department stores and catalog showrooms. 75% of U.S. Pioneer’s sales were from hi-fi specialty

Still, EMI has much to celebrate. It maintains one of the strongest catalogs of music and artists in the industry. EMI’s music-publishing division is stable and profitable, and its restructuring efforts appear to be gaining traction. EMI’s digital sales are expanding aggressively and now represent 10% of group revenue. The company also made an agreement with Apple to be the first major music company to offer its digital catalog using the new format that maintains better sound quality and fewer rights’ restrictions.

Finally, in order to complete a more accurate comparison between the two projects, we utilized the EANPV as the deciding factor. Under current accepted financial practice, NPV is generally considered the most accurate method of predicting the performance of a potential project. The duration of the projects is different, one lasts four years and one lasts six years. To account for the variation in time frames for the projects and to further refine our selection we calculated the EANPV to compare performance on a yearly basis.

When speaking economically, the digital music sector of the international music industry is undoubtably the most important sector in the industry. Within the last decade, music has seen cardinal changes in the way both major and independent labels distribute their products. An industry that once relied on Payola 's and mass distribution of physical records and CD 's now relies heavily on the power of the internet. The first instance of mass distribution of music through the internet was by the service Ritmoteca.com in 1998 [1]. Ritmoteca had a library of over 300,000 songs, offering individual songs for 99 cents each and albums for $9.99. After signing distribution deals with many major music labels such as Warner

Introduction: Setting the trend for the future, the distribution and consumption of recorded music transformed dramatically with the launching of Apple’s iTunes in 2001. The proliferation of online music subscription services and other music sharing services exerted a great pressure on the conventional music distribution business model. Combined with this transformation, piracy of digital music had a profound impact on the whole industry. These worsening conditions in the market place for recorded music forced both established and upcoming new artists to experiment with new ways of selling their music.

The major music-only stores such as Tower Records (which once wielded considerable influence in the industry) went bankrupt, replaced by box stores (such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy). Recording artists began to rely primarily on live performances and merchandise for their income, which in turn made them more dependent on music promoters such as Live Nation (which dominates tour promotion and owns a large number of music venues.)[6] In order to benefit from all of an artist 's income streams, record companies began to rely on the "360 deal", a new business relationship pioneered by Robbie Williams and EMI in 2007.[7] At the other extreme, record companies also used simple manufacturing and distribution deals, which gives a higher percentage to the artist, but does not cover the expense of marketing and promotion. Many newer artists no longer see any kind of "record deal" as an integral part of their business plan at all. Inexpensive recording hardware and software made it possible to create high quality music in a bedroom and distribute it over the internet to a worldwide audience.[8] This, in turn, caused problems for recording studios, record producers and audio engineers: the Los Angeles Times reported that, by 2009, as many as half of the recording facilities in that city had failed.[9] Consumers benefited enormously from the ease with which music can be shared from computer to computer, whether over the internet or by the exchange of

Most corporate financing decisions in practice reduce to a choice between debt and equity. The finance manager wishing to fund a new project, but reluctant to cut dividends or to make a rights issue, which leads to the decision of borrowing options. The issue with regards to shareholder objectives being met by the management in making financing decisions has come to become a major issue of recent times. This relates to understanding the concept of the agency problem. It deals with the separation of ownership and control of an organisation within a financial context. The financial manager can raise long-term funds internally, from the company’s cash flow, or externally, via the capital market, the market for funds