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Bob Olhsson wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From Michael Shoshani: "... it was RCA, not EMI,
who ended the arrangement..."
Interesting, I heard the opposite directly from folks who were at EMI and
Capital.
This info I got from "EMI: The First 100 Years" by Peter Martland, which
mentions everything from David Sarnoff resigning from the EMI Board in
1944 to stating that RCA and Columbia woke up and realized that a major
cash cow, the foreign market, was not in their hands, to the DOJ's
investigation of RCA and Columbia's alliances with EMI as being
monopolistic. The book mentions Fisk's attempt to reduce EMI's reliance
on existing US licensors with his 1946 agreement with MGM ("seen as
provocative by EMI's existing American associates" according to the
book, which also notes the move as being the final straw for the
venerable Alfred Clark, whose entire career had been based on
maintaining the links between EMI and RCA, and who resigned shortly
thereafter).
Its flat declarations are that Columbia severed relations in 1952 ("a
bitter blow to EMI), and that when Brenchley Mittel negotiated the final
five-year RCA contract that same year, the contract contained a clause
providing for the deletion of all RCA Victor material the following year
- this in a period when RCA-sourced material accounted for fifty percent
of EMI's total sales, according to the book.
I'm assumiming that few of the people active in EMI management at the
time are still around, but this book was published a decade ago. Perhaps
some could have been interviewed at that time, but I would imagine that
for this sort of things they would have to rely on paperwork, etc.