— Guy Hands has reportedly chosen to raise £105 million ($160 million) – far lower than the £360 million ($548 million) Terra Firma recently set as a target – and has little time to do it. Terra Firma’s largest investors have given a verbal commitment for £105 million, reports The Times. The company still needs to secure the approval of 75% of the fund’s investors by May 14, according to The Times. Because Citigroup needs to receive the cash by June 11, Terra Firma has little time to raise money elsewhere. (Times Online)
— September 2007 Terra Firma documents seen by the Daily Mail predicted EMI’s earnings before interest and other charges would reach £452 million ($689 million) in 2009. Terra Firma planned to build EMI to a market value of £9 billion ($13.7 billion) by 2012, the documents reveal. Actually, EMI’s had £298 million ($454 million) in earnings before interest and a write-down of Terra Firma’s investment and its value is now below its £4 billion ($6.09 billion) purchase price. As other articles have pointed out, EMI’s market share has been on the rise – Lady Antebellum is a major factor. But that debt is a big, dark cloud that hangs over an improving company. That why it’s almost pointless to use wordings like “profits before interest and other charges,” as the Mail did in this article. The interest, which is derived from EMI’s debt, is the story. You can’t talk about EMI without talking about interest and debt. Market share is merely a side bar to the main story. (Daily Mail)
– P2P veteran Wayne Rosso is shopping a tell-all book about his experiences with The Pirate Bay, Billboard has learned. Rosso was formerly a CEO at legal P2P service Mashboxx (which never launched) and president of P2P service Grokster. The Pirate Bay has been the center of an ongoing drama since Global Gaming Factory (GGF) announced its ambitious plan to acquire the company and convert it into a legal music service. GGF never secured the funding and was delisted from Sweden’s AktieTorget stock exchange over the public disclosures it made about its ability to acquire The Pirate Bay. Last year, Rosso worked briefly with GGF CEO Hans Pandaya to help the company acquire the proper licenses to launch the legal service. Sensing GGF was more talk than action, he backed out after just a few weeks and the service never launched. In a statement to CNET, Rosso said he had doubts about GGF’s ability to secure funding and questioned Pandeya’s credibility.
— Labels scored a victory last week when the Second Circuit ruled a subpoena process in Arista Records LLC v. Doe 3 had specific enough allegations to outweigh any subpoena target’s privacy interests. “[T]o the extent that anonymity is used to mask copyright infringement or to facilitate infringement by other persons,” it wrote, “it is unprotected by the First Amendment.” (Copyrights & Campaigns)
— Apple has no plans to immediately replace Lala with cloud-based functions within iTunes, reports MediaMemo. Apple has indicated interest in such functions, but talks are merely preliminary. With news that Lala is shutting down at the end of May, speculation was high that Apple would soon introduce something to take advantage of its technology – such as a browser-based version of iTunes with cloud storage. Instead, we’ll probably get some Lala features rolled into the iTunes client. Eventually. (MediaMemo)
— Matt Rosoff at Digital Noise is perplexed by the implication of MediaMemo’s report and asks, “Why Does the Record Industry Hate Music Lockers?” It’s a good question to ask right now. Labels love the prospects of access models. Music lockers – cloud-based storage of a person’s digital music files, usually with playback and organization features – have experienced roadblocks. Writes Rosoff, “For some reason, the big recording industry doesn’t like the idea of allowing users to store their music collections anywhere but on their own computers and MP3 players. From a user perspective, this makes no sense at all. It’s not like users are getting free unlimited streams of every song ever recorded, as they can with on-demand services such as Grooveshark…These are songs users already have on their hard drives.” (Digital Noise)
— ‘American Idol’ judge Randy Jackson has launched a new dance label, DreamMerchant21, and ‘Idol’ alum Kimberley Locke is the first signing.
— PepsiCo has partnered with geolocation service Foursquare and UMG to reach out to consumers. In the next two months, the beverage company will launch its own geo-targeting mobile application, Pepsi Loot. The app points users to Pepsi retailers and reward them for buying a Pepsi with points that can be redeemed for a free music download from Universal Music. (Forbes)
