EMI saw annual profits slip more than 8% as piracy continued to hit the record industry, although acts such as Norah Jones and Coldplay helped it gain market share, the British music group said today.
Headline pre-tax profits for the year ending on March 31 fell to £163.3m, 8.7% lower than the same period a year before, EMI said in a statement. The figure was near the bottom end of market expectations.
Nonetheless, EMI had delivered what were good results in 'a marketplace that has continued to be extremely challenging', group chairman Eric Nicoli said.
'We delivered full-year sales and operating profit close to last year's level while the global market declined by almost 6% in the same period,' he said. 'This achievement demonstrates the strength of both our recorded music and music publishing businesses.'
The figures were boosted by notable results for artists such as multi-million selling US singer-songwriter Norah Jones, increasingly popular British angst-rockers Coldplay and compatriot Robbie Williams. The golden oldies also did their bit, with Duran Duran's greatest hits selling well and a stripped down re-mix of the Beatles' last album, shifting more than three million copies worldwide.
Such stars helped EMI claw a 13.2% share of the global recorded music market, up from 12.7% the previous year and with North America generating particularly good gains, the company said.
But piracy 'continues to be a major problem for the industry', Nicoli said, both in terms of people downloading songs free via the Internet and also copying albums onto blank CD-ROM discs. 'A flood of cheap blank CDs, mainly from Asia, has fuelled physical piracy in many parts of the world and has contributed to industry declines,' he explained.
EMI's total revenue slipped 2.5% to £2.12 billion but the group said this was significantly outperforming the global music market, which declined by 5.6%. The group also stressed its efforts to boost legitimate music access on the Internet, saying that revenues of digital music sales had trebled to £15m.
