According to Roger's morning dispatch, both Lee Trink and Jason Flom are losing their jobs at the Capitol Music Group, although Friedman manages to botch their job titles, so who knows. Either way, if the story is true, Hands plans to try running the label without actual executives at all.

Neither Trink nor Flom will be replaced. Guy Hands and the folks from Terra Firma, the new owners of EMI who have no experience in the record business, don't believe in label presidents.

This means that as Coldplay — the group headed by Gwyneth Paltrow's husband, Chris Martin — releases "Viva La Vida," the biggest album of its career, its American record label will have no one running it. This also means that the Beatles will have no one directly representing them. Neither will Katy Perry, who has the No. 1 single in the country with "I Kissed a Girl," or any other Capitol acts.

And the funny part is that none of them knows it. As of Monday morning, no one from EMI had bothered to call the people representing any of those acts to tell them the news. They even left the Beatles' Apple Records out of the loop. The Beatles catalog, which is not available for official downloading anywhere, still sells millions of CDs for Capitol.

This is the way I am told all the EMI labels will be run. Nick Gatfield is coming in to take over as "president of A&R labels for North America and the U.K." for all of EMI. But the individual labels will not have presidents. They will have "A&R presidents" and heads of marketing.

Possibly why none of the Capitol divisions haven't been informed is because the move isn't really happening, but even the idea that a label would go without actual presidents, especially after hiring a musically indifferent virtual-world bubble veteran yesterday, is a boldly ridiculous move. Maybe that sort of crazy talk is exactly what EMI needs to survive! Have Apple Martin run the company, or possibly some trained monkeys in Katy Perry t-shirts. It's a bold new world of possibilities when you've given up on reason.

Coldplay, Beatles Lose Leader [Fox News]

... I've watched from the sidelines helplessly while EMI / Parlophone completely fucked the act I put two years into my life developing 'Siobhan Donaghy'.... when It was finally released I could have sold more records then they did out the back of my car at the markets...it was out on lime-wire 6 months before release and even though everyone wanted it, no one could get it, the physical release and digital releases were a week apart and a third of the CD boxes had the wrong CD in them.. some old jazz record from the 70's

All the time the 'UM and Argh' man was out at my studio in france talking about how great the album is and how huge it will be...... it turns out they were in secret talks with Terra Firma to jump ship and sell up.......

"Some old jazz record from the '70s"? Aieee. And he's right about the album leaking; I first posted about wanting Ghosts to come out over here back in April, and was promptly rewarded with a Rapidshare link from a reader; the album wasn't set to be released for a good two and a half months after that, at which time it debuted on the UK album charts at No. 92. And then it sank like a stone.

On the bright side, I'm sure that this story is thrilling Terra Firma, the company that now owns EMI; CEO Guy Hands recently said that his company was "just hoping EMI is as bad as [they] think it is" so that it could really, really right the label's ship—and even "care for every artist." Well, you know, they may want to start rooting out the problems in their packaging department first.

Lefsetz Letter [lefsetz.com]
Siobhan Donaghy - So You Say [YouTube]