EMI are in the final stages of moving out from the building (in the picture above) across the road from me. LondonJazz goes into lamentation mode….

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There are no longer any taxis outside with their meters running, in wait for casually clad suits to swan down and claim them. Today the red letters EMI RECORDS (so good they named it twice) were removed. There are a few standard lamps in reception, bar-bells from a corporate gym, a small poster of a band called Gorillaz.

It’s a curious sight. The “latest news” page of the UK corporate website has an album released in June 2008. Private equity owner Guy Hands relinquished day-to-day control last week, it being a series of mysteries why he took control, why he bought the company (the share price 86% down since purchase) , why he thought he understood the industry….

Today’s news is that the ex-Google head of the digital division has left within a year of joining, the idea that he would to turn EMI into “a services company that could profit from small bands” looking so last year. Here’s the internal memo from the CEO ( a record industry novicewho joined last year from Reckitt Benckiser- as in Harpic, Airwick Dettol) announcing the departure.

I read on allthingsd.com by a writer called Peter Kafka that the last really successful artist was Norah Jones (genre I’m told: adult contemporary pop/vocal jazz) , Ravi Shankar’s daughter who did ship 36 million albums bless her…

Well, Will Page, the Scottish economist at MCPS-PRS (he did admit in a speech which I attended that he starts with more reasons to be miserable than the rest of us) now reckons that live performances are now worth more than recorded music for the first time in British music industry history.

Which is another reason why LondonJazz chooses to cover the live scene…