Excerpts from EMI Chairman Eric Nicoli’s keynote address at MidemNet are in bold, my translations and interpretations are in italics.

Today’s consumer has much, much more choice than ever – and that choice is expanding exponentially.
To which we’ve responded by giving half of our business to discount retailers like Wal-Mart, who stock a whopping 750 titles, and killed off 1,200 record stores in the process.

Since I took on the Chairmanship of EMI six and half years ago, it’s been clear to me that digital distribution would play a massive and expanding role in our industry.
That’s why we pulled techies like Ted Cohen out of the basement and are counting on them to save our jobs and asses.

We’ve been at the forefront of industry efforts to contain on-line piracy since before MP3.com gave everyone a massive wake up call.
How’s that working out for us? Well, sales are still plummeting and my stock options are worthless, but our lawyers’ kids may never have to work.

As Al Capone once said, ‘you can go a long way with a smile; but you can go a lot further with a smile and a gun’. I think what he was trying to say was that the multimedia approach to business increases your chances of success - and that cooperation between the various constituencies that you work with is important to the achievement of your objectives.
Hoo boy. And if you think Al Capone was talking about a multimedia approach to business, or even knew what one was, then using one of America’s most violent gangsters as a model for customer outreach isn’t much of a cognitive stretch for you. I guess the “smile” metaphor is the package of restrictive music services and spyware-laden DRM, while the “gun” is the threat of lawsuits. Pure poetry, Eric!

When we look at a more recent snapshot in the same country and note that in the first two weeks of 2006, digital sales were up over 120% on the same period a year ago, you can give me a few years of that kind of ‘gloom’ any time you like!
That’s why we propose a Christmas holiday every quarter, so that people will have four opportunities a year to foist the iPod/iTunes system on everyone they know.

We’ve moved on from the days when the main impact of digital technology was to harm our industry by facilitating rampant online and physical theft.
But we haven’t moved on so far as to consider voluntary or compulsory licensing.

And with the launch of subscription services, ringtone and ringtune sites and video streaming and download services, consumers have been presented with far greater choice.
They’ve also been presented with a confusing morass of non-interoperable standards, usage restrictions and omnipresent legal threats. Which is why most of ‘em are still using peer-to-peer services by an order of magnitude.

France has always respected copyright and supported the creative industries, so it seems an aberration that the country has taken a first step towards a ‘global licence’. If continues down this road, it could jeopardise the promising growth we’re now seeing in the legitimate online market.
Math time, Eric: €5 (roughly $6.13) x 12 months x 150M Internet users = just over $11 billion, which, coincidently, isn’t far what the US recorded music industry grossed last year. Which means CD sales, declining or otherwise, would be gravy. Either thank France or go home.