People always say that when they start getting older and set in their ways. Back when you were 18, I guarantee most people your parents age were sat there saying "There's no real music being made today, why are youngsters listening to this junk?" It's bollocks - music today is just as good as it was 20 or 40 years ago.
His horrendous call was that it was a great business because of publishing royalities, when the revenues are being eroded by file-sharing, and the bypassing of record companies in finding and distributing new music. As I already said in the original post, Hendry got lucky because a greater fool paid up for the stock. If Hendry had say "this is a shitty business that is going to die out, but I know that the private equity guys are going to stupidly overpay for it, so I'm in it for a quick trade", I would agree with you he made a good trade. But he didn't say that, he genuinely thought it was a good long-term investment, and on that he was horrendously wrong. He made a horrendous call and got lucky. EMI has been a financial disaster, Terra Firma has lost billions on the investment. How do the other responses on here "blow up my points"? They were all claiming EMI was making money, when it lost over $2 billion last year, and Terra Firma has written down almost their entire investment, and seeing their balance sheet shot to bits by the huge debt load they took on to pay a peak valuation for the takeover. Please explain how blowing $3 billion and suffering a >90% loss on investment in 3 years is anything but a horrendous call.
Who knows why he said what he said. Maybe he truly believed it, or maybe he was publicly promoting his investment in the hope that someone would come along to pay him more for it (which apparently happened). The most likely answer is that at one point he truly believed it, then realized maybe that wasn't the case, and then had the fortitude to not only get out of the position, but to get out at a profit. I wish I could make such bad decisions all the time.
If you judge by declining revenues of the music industry, the reason may be totally different. In Richard Bronason's Business Stripped Bare it is asserted in 1970s and early 1980s music for personal use was a big thing among the young generation. So, vinyl discs and cassettes sold in large quantities. In late 1990s the big thing was mobile devices. Currently, the big thing is probably online communication such as myspace and facebook. The point is buying music is nowhere near as popular a trend among young people now compared to the 1970s when the music industry as we know it today appeared. So, naturally, revenues for both artists and labels collapsed and probabbly far fewer talented people aspire to become a rock or pop star.