EMI suppresses Universal resurgence.

No change as EMI claim more than 25% of combined share in 2007's first quarter report

by Paul Williams

Even before the purchase of BMG Music Publishing was greenlighted by the European Commission, the year was already starting to shape up positively for Universal's publishing executives.

After slumping to its worst annual market share showing to date in 2006, Paul Connolly's team bounced back in style to capture 22.3% on the combined rankings for quarter one 2007, a share some two-thirds better than it managed during the previous quarter when a poor close to 2006 condemned it to fourth place behind EMI, Sony/ATV and Warner/Chappell.

But, as Universal rode to its highest share yet, EMI Publishing was itself challenging some of its best performances of the past. Its 28.2% share for the quarter was the company's highest such score since the third quarter of 2004, while on albums the clock had to be turned back even further to find a time when it claimed a bigger share of the market. In quarter one, it grabbed an albums share of 33.3%, its best performance in the sector for exactly nine years, when the likes of The Verve's Urban Hymns sent its score racing to 35.6%.

For EMI, the albums market was particularly memorable in these three months, with a run that included more than 95% of Amy Winehouse's Back To Black, which sold nearly 468,000 units to finish as the period's biggest seller, while it handled more than one-third of Take That's runner-up Beautiful World, had exclusive control of The Fratellis' Costello Music (eighth biggest seller of the quarter) and Bloc Party's A Weekend In The City (18th biggest seller), most of Norah Jones' Not Too Late (14th) and nearly half of Nelly Furtado's Loose (ninth).

Of course, it is hard not to look at these figures and weigh up how EMI and Universal would have fared against one another had Universal's merger with BMG Publishing already been approved. But answering that is a far more complicated procedure than simply adding together Universal and BMG's scores and comparing the result with EMI's showing.