EMI bids to buy Robbie's loyalty

March 26, 2002 Posted: 5:49 AM EST

EMI is thought to have doubled its offer to keep Williams on its books

LONDON, England - EMI is reported to be offering British pop star Robbie Williams a new £40 million ($57 million) deal in a bid to reverse the record company's faltering fortunes.

The proposed contract comes days after EMI announced it was to axe 1,800 jobs to save up to £100 million ($142 million) a year.

Reports said company executives had been in talks with Williams, 28, amid speculation that the singer was being courted by American labels.

The £40 million deal is more than twice as much as EMI's original offer, The Times newspaper in London said.

The performer's last album, Swing While You're Winning, has already topped five million sales while his duet with Australian actress Nicole Kidman clinched the UK Christmas number one in 2001.

But analysts have said that Williams has been frustrated by not breaking the world's biggest market -- the United States -- and may want a label with bigger clout, such as Universal Music.

EMI, whose other artists include Kylie Minogue, Cold Play, Blur and Radiohead, announced last week it was streamlining one-fifth of their recorded music division's global workforce and cutting its talent roster by a quarter.

About a third of the redundancies will be in Europe.

New chairman Alain Levy admitted at the time it was becoming tougher to get big names to join the likes of Williams and Gorillaz on its books.

EMI has seen its fortunes dip recently

Levy, who previously oversaw Polygram's rise to the top of the industry, said last week he was putting a stop to the music industry's lavish ways of huge artist advances and would bring some discipline back to the business.

He said he wanted to have three superstar artists selling more than 10 million albums on EMI's roster within three years.

He said executives had said Minogue's latest album, Fever, had not been thought suitable for the U.S. market.

However, Levy released it there and it debuted at number three in the charts.

The EMI strategy review comes after two profit warnings from EMI in the past six months and two failed merger attempts in the past two years.

EMI recently dumped U.S. singer Maria Carey year after her first album with the company, Glitter, flopped.

It paid the pop diva £19 million ($28 million) to end her recording contract, which, together with £18 million ($26.4 million) of balance sheet and other write-offs linked to her recording contract, marked a disaster for the company.

EMI signed Carey, 31, to its Virgin Records label in 2001 in what was said to be the biggest recording contract ever, estimated at $80 million over four albums.

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