Stones Exit EMI, Jump to Universal

After the latest skirmish between EMI’s new owner and the recording label’s bands, the Rolling Stones have fled for Universal—in a $15 million deal that includes rights to all Stones releases since 1971. Mick Jagger & Co. knocked EMI on the way out the door, the Times of London reports, saying in a statement, “Universal are forward thinking, creative and hands-on music people.”

The band, whose back catalog makes roughly $3 million a year, signed a 5-year deal with Universal, which is said to believe it can make more. The jilted label—which cracked, “EMI Music will only ever conclude mutually beneficial agreements with its artists”—also lost Radiohead in the past year, under unfriendly terms. (More Rolling Stones stories.)