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That dry, rasping sound you hear is Canada’s Edgar Bronfman jr (right) rubbing his hands together  at the prospect of finally getting them on EMI.

He runs Warner Music, the smallest member of the Big 4 organised music gang, the others being Vivendi Universal, EMI, EMI and Sony Music, all of whom are once again ignoring charges of price fixing brought against them in an antitrust class action.

They’ll skate by, as they always do, but EMI may not be among their number except, perhaps, as an appendage of Warner.

“Katy Perry may have turned up to EMI’s post-Grammys party in a revealing silver dress, but even the ‘I Kissed a Girl’ singer (who is signed to Capitol Records, a subsidiary of EMI) could not monopolize all the attention”, says Time.

Because,  “Despite the lavish affair at the W Hotel in Hollywood, EMI is in desperate financial trouble. So deep, in fact, that some were wondering how it could afford to host a party at all.”

However, lavishness has ever been an EMI trademark.  At one point “it was a spending $400,000 a year on party favors (booze, drugs, women, whatever) for its talent”, p2pnet quoted Silicon Insider as saying.

Controlled by Guy Hands’ Terra Firma, EMI lost a staggering £1.8bn last year leaving it in desperate need of a £120m cash injection to stave off lender Citigroup from taking control of the business, said the Telegraph recently.

That was some $3,012,441,630 Canadian.

Bronfman believes it’s “OK to terrorise families around the world, accusing mothers and their children of being file-sharing criminals and thieves and threatening them with lawsuits they can never hope to adequately defend themselves against, but mildly admonishing his own kids when they do the same thing”, said p2pnet last summer.

“Now Edgar is moving to London,” we said, going on, “Is he perhaps seeking a peerage as did another Canadian, Conrad Black? Sir Edgar Bronfman?

“Stranger things have happened — but No. It’s  in all likelihood something far more prosaic.

“Bidnes.”

Now, “Warner Music sees no regulatory barrier to a bid for all or part of EMI, its chairman and chief executive said yesterday, heightening expectations that the UK music group’s debt troubles might lead to a combination of the two labels,” says the Financial Times, quoting Brinman as saying:

“We feel consolidation certainly is possible”, and that the “regulatory climate had not hardened since the European Commission’s 2007 approval of the merger between Sony Music and BMG”.

However, Bronfman “tempered his remarks by saying he hoped EMI would be able to ‘resolve its difficulties’ in a way that strengthened the music industry”, says the story.

Riiight.

“They are marching towards a transaction of some sorts,” the story has Pali Research’s Richard Greenfield saying.

Warner had been “hoarding cash” over recent quarters and could find “hundreds of millions of dollars” in savings from such a deal, he added.

And then there were three …

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