Carey-out on EMI menu

Label looks to cut ties to 'Glitter' songstress

By REUTERS

Carey

Three months after the commercial flop of Mariah Carey's first EMI release, "Glitter," the British-based music giant is seeking to buy out Carey's contract by offering her a huge lump-sum payment in exchange for her departure from EMI's Virgin Records label.

Estimates on the value of Carey's EMI contract run from $80 million for four albums to as much as $118 million for five albums.

EMI executives are now in talks to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement to Carey in return for her agreement to bail out of the label, the L.A. Times reported. Representatives for Carey, EMI, or Virgin Records could not be reached for comment.

EMI signed Carey in April after the singer had endured an increasingly unhappy stint at Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment, which is run by her ex-husband, Tommy Mottola.

"Glitter," Carey's debut album at Virgin and the soundtrack to the film she starred in, sold a disappointing 2 million copies worldwide since its release in September. In the U.S. it has shipped more than 500,000 copies but is selling fewer than 10,000 copies per week. By comparison, her 1993 album "Music Box," released by Sony, sold more than 20 million copies domestically and overseas.

The retail fizzle of "Glitter" also capped a personally trying period for Carey, who was hospitalized for a mental and physical breakdown in July and suffered a relapse in September. Carey's health limited her availability to do advance promotion for the album and movie, a semiautobiographical film in which she starred as an aspiring young singer who dates a DJ to help her break into the business.