"It was a classic piece of music industry journalism: Rapacious Big Music beats up on hapless Little Guy, with The Artist, who just wants to make ars gratia artis, caught in the middle. This time, Big Music was ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, which collects licensing royalties for songwriters, composers, and music publishers. The Little Guy was a humble Irish bar called Connolly’s Pub & Restaurant. And The Artist was none other than New Jersey’s own “rock & roll working-class hero,” Bruce Springsteen."

"After years of complaints, last year the music labels finally got what they wanted from Apple–the ability to raise prices on their songs. Last April, iTunes introduced a “variable pricing” scheme, which gave the labels the ability to move prices from 99 cents a song to $1.29 (and for some tracks, down to 69 cents).The result? Music sales are slowing."

"Today, the Filter powers recommendations for sites and devices with a combined reach of about 20 million people, with two more large media deals in the final stages of converting from a trail to a full license which will bring its total reach up to 85 million. The startup’s revenues went from $150,000 in 2008 to about $1 million in 2009. “All that money came from licensing,” says Roberts. “I think we git $2,000 from Google for advertising.” Since November, the company has been “borderline breakeven.” And it just added to its board of directors former Google engineering VP Doug Merrill, who left Google to briefly serve as president of EMI for a year."

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But the real clash has been between Mr. Hands and Citigroup, the bank that financed the EMI acquisition and many other Terra Firma deals. Terra Firma used only $3 billion of its investors’ cash to buy the music company; it borrowed the remaining $5.2 billion from Citi. Why was Terra Firma’s lender so generous? The bank thought it could later offload this debt by selling it in smaller chunks to other investors.

Then reality intruded. Before the deal closed in August 2007, the credit market froze — leaving Citi holding a vast bag of debt that it designated as “substandard.” The transaction offered yet another example of the kind of promiscuous lending that forced the government to rescue Citi the next year.

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