EMI goes Zombie: its business is now owning and exploiting its copyrights.

I’ve written before that the publishing industry is a “walking corpse” because the virtual monopoly the industry once had over the production and distribution of texts is gone:

The ways we produce, copy, and disseminate information have entirely changed. Anyone sitting in a coffee shop can produce a document that looks as if it’s been typeset. (And I’m sure my students have no clue what typesetting is.) That document can be copied at virtually no cost, and disseminated world-wide at virtually no cost.

The same, of course, goes for the music industry. And now EMI is proving that it is no more than a zombie preying off of the vitality of living art rather than producing life. As The Economist reports, EMI is abandoning the business of producing music and instead converting to a business that exploits intellectual property rights:

In recent days EMI’s owner, Terra Firma, a private-equity firm, has had to pump in fresh capital because it had breached its banking covenants. On June 18th it announced drastic management changes and an important strategic shift. Two of its bosses, Charles Allen and John Birt, will leave, and the head of EMI’s music-publishing division, Roger Faxon, will become chief executive of the whole company. EMI also announced that it would “reposition itself as a comprehensive rights-management company serving artists and songwriters worldwide”. Rough translation: owning and exploiting the copyright to songs, rather than selling recordings of songs, is where the money’s going to be from now on.