![]() ![]() That’s right, the Capitol Tower is a rental for the company that made it famous. STORY: It’s Official: Steve Barnett Named Chairman and CEO of Capitol Music Group The move was followed in due haste by a sale of EMI to Guy Hands’ Terra Firma for $8.3 billion, only to see it taken over by Citigroup four years later after a contentious legal battle over the buying price, which the bank helped negotiate. After the record company boom of the 1980s, when the likes of Duran Duran and Heart moved tens of millions of pricey LPs, and the bloated greed of the ’90s (when music fans reacquired their album libraries on CD) came the great cash-out of 2006, when then-EMI heads Alain Levy and David Munns sold the building and adjacent properties for $50 million. ![]() But despite its inviting exterior, the building, and the company it housed, have suffered years of slow decline. ![]() Therein lies the magic of this landmark address, a place that has curated the soundtracks to multiple generations. She came back up and said, ‘Is this how it always is here?’ ” “They looked at her, she stopped, she couldn’t even move. After her first meeting in the offices, “She was heading out and when the elevator door opened, standing there was Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr, Bill Withers, Don Was and Joe Walsh,” says Barnett. Take, for example, a recent anecdote recounted by CMG chairman Steve Barnett involving newly signed L.A. 22, the latter seeing a successful follow-up to the Grammy-winning 2010 album The Suburbs - but thanks to the steady stream of veteran artists booking time in the famed Capitol recording studios, housed in the tower’s basement, random run-ins are still de rigueur. (UMG bought EMI’s recorded music arm in 2012 for $1.9 billion.) Today, Katy Perry and Arcade Fire rule the roster - the former reaching gold status on her latest album, Prism, which has sold 524,000 units since Oct. Scores of legendary musicians - from the Beach Boys to the Beatles, Nat King Cole to Judy Garland - have roamed its halls, which now are home to Capitol Music Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Universal Music Group. ![]()
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