Who is Esperanza Spalding? You didn’t get the memo?

By Nobodaddy on 07-11-2008

Ah, Guy Hands! That lovably ludicrous EMI chairman/specter (who seems to haunt at LEAST one TMT news story a week these days) has such an absurdly captain-goes-down-with-ship job title and equally ludicrous name that he could probably so much as go to the damn BATHROOM and we satirically-bent music writers would still probably hit the keys all 8-fingers-blazing to writeup a cheeky news piece about it as fast as we could... all (or at least, largely) for the joy of riddling that comic-book name of his with (hardly) revolutionary bullets of music-proletariat sarcasm.

I can see it now: "Hands Uses Rest Room, Fails to Wash Hands." Or maybe: "Guy Hands to Neighboring Stall: ‘Hands’ Off My Toilet Paper!" Maybe good for a yuk in that postmodern, "look how tired this reads!" kind of way, but generally not the kind of stuff we'd stake our dorky college-newspaper-editor reputations on. Frankly, we pun writers could probably use a break from Mr. Guy Hands. And fortunately (read: not a minute too soon) for all us cheapshotters, it seems as though we're about to get one.

Yup. Hands has promised to step back from day-to-day management of music industry mega-giant EMI, after appointing Elio Leoni-Sceti as chief executive of the company's "recorded music division" this week. Leoni-Sceti himself had this to say (or, more likely, to read carefully):

This is a hugely exciting time for the music business and for EMI. EMI is the world’s longest established music company operating in over 40 markets globally with a roster of some of the most successful artists in the world. They range from long established names such as The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Queen and The Beach Boys to contemporary singers such as Kylie Minogue, Lily Allen and Norah Jones. Its current successes include Coldplay and Katy Perry topping both the UK and US charts. The potential that can be realised in this industry is massive, music consumption is growing more than ever across the world and I cannot wait to get started and to working with EMI’s artists and employees.

Ol' Guy "All" Hands (sorry, I'm an addict), meanwhile, has claimed he will take the roll of "non-executive chairman," leaving the company to return to its traditional bi-tyrannical structure of having separate chief executives for both its recorded music and music publishing divisions (the long-serving and less-comically-named Roger Faxon currently heads the publishing division).

So where did Mr. "Busy" Hands (last time, I promise) dig up EMI's newest chief executive? Well, you'll all be happy to know that Mr. Leoni-Sceti, a seasoned marketer, has absolutely no background in the industry whatsoever, having spent the past 16 years as executive vice president (and a bang-up vice president, to be sure) with Reckitt Benckiser, a European FTSE30 "consumer brand" company. Oh, yeah, and in case you were wondering, kids, this is the company that makes Clearasil acne cream, among other things, and, as we all know, music and teen skin-care issues have been going hand-in-hand at least since "The Limbo Rock" charted.

Citing his belief that EMI needs to focus on selling music more effectively (read: NOT going broke via cajoling the Jonas Brothers to stay a little longer and releasing more Radiohead best-ofs to the Starbucks generation), Handsy (shove it) sez that the pesky little matter of signing those whiny "new" artists is to be handled by Nick Gatfield, a former executive with Universal, who is joining up with Team Stayafloat to run its labels worldwide. So, you know, this should probably fix everything, right? Oh well. At least it might put a cap on some of those puns.