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EMI Loses Its Other Silicon Valley Wiz
from the that-didn't-take-long dept
Well so much for that. About a year ago, it seemed like perhaps (just perhaps) EMI would be the first of the big major record labels to really learn how to embrace the digital era. First, it talked about leaving the RIAA and IFPI. Then, it talked about the importance of learning from Radiohead's success with the "pay-what-you-want" experiment. Finally, it hired some Silicon Valley stars. First, it hired Google's CIO Doug Merrill, and soon after that brought on Second Life's co-founder Cory Ondrejka. Suddenly, we began to wonder what would happen if a major record label actually had management talent that understood digital technologies.
But... it quickly became clear that this was not to be the case. EMI seemed to view both Merrill and Ondrejka as being in the "digital silo." And, if there's one thing we've learned, if you have a chief digital officer in a media company, you're doing it wrong. Pretending that digital is a "silo" is wrong. Digital impacts every area of your business, and pretending that it's separate suggests you don't have the right strategy in place.
And, of course, the fact that EMI become one of the most aggressive companies suing every potentially innovative startup out there didn't engender much confidence that the company had figured out how to embrace the new online world.
So it wasn't much of a surprise when Doug Merrill left after less than a year. However, the company then promoted Ondrejka. I saw Ondrejka speak at least year's Midem, and he talked up all these pie-in-the-sky ideas that never actually seemed to show up. Last month, when EMI's CEO admitted the company had lost touch with consumers and didn't know how to fix it, you had to wonder what the company had been doing.
And, now comes the news that Cory Ondrejka is also leaving EMI. He lasted just slightly longer than Merrill, sticking around for an entire 14 months, where it doesn't appear that EMI did anything particularly creative on the digital side, but did sue a whole bunch of innovators. Oh yeah, and it launched a blog. As far as I can tell, that's about the most innovative digital thing it's done in a while (yes, there's sarcasm there).
Oh well. It makes you wonder what could have been.
