An advertisement in last Thursday’s Financial Times demanded “fair play for musicians” and was signed by thousands of people whose names rarely appear in this newspaper – Sir Cliff Richard, Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Simon Rattle. The advertisement raised more questions than it answered. Why the FT? And why, amid the mass of print, was there no explanation of the issues or mention of the company principally responsible for the campaign? Here is the story.

EMI was probably Britain’s most innovative business of the 20th century. It pioneered television, sold the first commercial computer, made the breakthrough in transferring technology from defence electronics to medicine that put a scanner in every hospital and, in the 1960s, transformed the popular music industry. But – and this is a very British story – the company’s inventive capability was never matched by its manufacturing strength or commercial acumen. EMI exited television and computing in the face of powerful competition and never recovered from its trouncing by GE in the medical equipment market. Music is, today, its main activity.