EMI ISSUES STATEMENT REGARDING CENTURY MEDIA ALBUMS POSTED ON SPOTIFY

Last week we noticed that a few new Century Media releases — new albums by The Devastated and Caliban, and a single by Rise to Remain — had appeared on Spotify. We wondered whether Century had adopted a policy of posting albums by upcoming and/or struggling artists, whether they’d seen the light about Spotify, or even perhaps if they’d finally negotiated a more favorable deal with the service.

Turns out none of those were the reason: EMI, the major label group that handles Century’s digital distribution, just plain messed up.

Here’s an official statement from EMI released exclusively to MetalSucks yesterday:

OK, we’re just going to say it – we made a big mistake. We appreciate that’s not something you hear a major music company every day, but then we’d like to think EMI isn’t like every other company anyway.

We are big believers in putting the needs of our artists first. And that extends to the labels we partner with, including the Century Media. So when they told us in August last year that they didn’t want their music on Spotify, that was enough for us and we simply pulled it all off the service.

Which brings us back to that mistake. We accidentally delivered a number of albums by Century artists to Spotify. Which is where you saw them.

As soon as we realized our mistake, we immediately notified Spotify, and the titles were removed from their system.

We’re obviously embarrassed that this happened, and we’ve taken steps to make sure it can’t happen again. And we’re very sorry to Century and its artists for the trouble we’ve caused.

The offending albums have all since been pulled.

Oh well — it was nice to think that Century was finally making forward strides. All hail The Great CD Resurrection of 2012, in which CM Distro will finally rescue the record industry from its current doldrums one piece of plastic at a time!

-VN