EMI incoming head of digital Douglas Merrill did a Q&A with Billboard.

There's actually academic data that suggests file sharing is good for some artists. That's very much against the common prevailing wisdom, but the minute you look at the data on it you find some fascinating things. I think part of what I'm excited about doing at EMI is doing a bunch of experimenting to see what works and what doesn't. How do we add value to artists? How do we help fans find and experience artists? How do we find the right value to add? I'm really looking forward to see what happens in the next 12 months.

If you sum all the papers on P2P, the overall opinion is that it neither helps nor hurts recorded music sales. Merrill is right to say file sharing helps some artists. Unfortunately for EMI, file sharing tends to hurts the big earners (this is supported by some research) and helps the most the sort of albums that don't recoup. If Merrill's presence can help turn mid-hits into profitable albums, EMI will have won half the battle. I don't doubt Hands believes a restructured, re-imagined EMI can be sustained with lower expenses. The other half of the battle is continuing to create big hits (which, again, are exposed to file sharing).

Hits also have the greatest exposure to format substitution. Hits are usually driven my singles, and customers are free to cherry pick the single and forgo the purchase of an album. I think one of Merrill's top goals should be to figure out ways to maximize the percentage of all purchases that are albums or bundles. When consumers embrace digital music, they tend to get more into a singles mindset. This is ruinous for record labels that can't recoup on sales of single tracks. You can argue that labels need to change so projects are less dependent on album sales and are more likely to break even, but most of that is out of Merrill's control.

Merrill also spoke with the Los Angeles Times and brought up the P2P topic.

As a sign of his willingness to consider bold moves, Merrill held open the possibility that people sharing music online -- an illegal practice that the music industry has fought to stop through lawsuits -- might help some artists during certain parts of their career. "Maybe a lot of the things we assume are not actually correct," he said.

I'm not sure where he's going with this. Can one harness file sharing at one point in an artist's career and minimize its damages at another point in the artist's career?