Image borrowed from the London Evening Standard

News today that Guy Hands has lost his case in court means that bankruptcy seems likely and Citigroup will no doubt sell off the assets to the highest bidder.

That includes, as everyone points out, the lucrative publishing arm of the business. What doesn’t get talked about so much is the archive of all the old master tapes of the back catalogue. And I’m not just talking about the Beatles.

I sort of half-joked when all this started to look like a problem that the British Government should nationalise EMI. Now I’m not joking.

I said:

After all, a case could be made that things that are of significant worth to the British public, economically and culturally speaking, should theoretically be in the ownership of the British public. Especially when those assets are under serious threat as a result of private ownership mismanagement and ‘market conditions’.

Rather than have the rights to some of the most important British cultural treasures in the hands of a billionaire tax exile, a private equity firm and a transnational bank – and in imminent danger of having them simply flogged off to who knows where just to dispense with what has become, in financial terms, a ‘toxic asset’ – it would make sense to put them into public ownership.

Honestly, I don’t care if EMI ever releases another record. What’s important is that the full history of that label (and not just the things currently available in stores) be preserved properly and made available as a cultural treasure for the British people.

There’ll be a firesale price. Pay it, fold the money-losing recording company, release the artists from their contracts, and keep the archives.

My pick? Give it to the BBC and put it in the care of Tony Ageh with specific instructions to make sure it’s digitised, kept indefinitely and made available. Give them the publishing wing while you’re at it, to pay for the cost of digitisation, preservation, curation and stewardship.

And make sure they understand (as Ageh seems to) that ownership by the BBC means ownership by the public. And that means that the recordings themselves are fast-tracked into the public domain.

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UPDATE: Just to be absolutely clear – there’s a strong possibility that if the company is stripped of assets, whoever ends up with the old reels of tape is just as likely to bin or burn those that are not potential sources of revenue. For a commercial investor, a tape in a vault represents little more than an expense. And for the vast majority of what’s in there, these are the only decent copies in existence.