THIRTY years ago Jorgen Larsen’s career as a songwriter met its Waterloo. Literally.

Larsen, then a brash young executive with CBS Records, had written a song as a bet, to prove he could pen a hit. The ditty, called Monkey Song and sung by a locally signed CBS artist, duly rocketed to No 2 in the Swedish charts in 1974. It might have hit the top, but for that year’s winners of the Eurovision Song Contest. Abba’s huge hit, Waterloo, cruelly deprived Monkey Song of its shot at immortality.

Had the Swedish foursome not exploded on to the global music scene that very week, Larsen might have taken up composing. But Monkey Song went into obscurity and it was Larsen’s career as a record company executive that hit No 1.

Danish-born Larsen wound up running Abba’s record label, and is now the most powerful man in the record industry outside the US. As chairman and chief executive of Universal Music International, he controls almost a quarter of all music sales from South America to Europe and Asia. He reports to Doug Morris, head of Universal Music Group.

Larsen joined Universal Music International as president in 1993, taking his current role five years on when Edgar Bronfman Jr merged Universal Music with PolyGram. Bronfman now heads the rival Warner Music Group (WMG).

Today Larsen’s focus is on saving the recording industry from its worst downturn, which he blames on music piracy. Speaking to The Times from Germany, one of the markets worst hit by piracy, Larsen says that file-swapping and burning of CDs remains the greatest threat not only to record companies, but to cultural diversity in music.

“Germany used to be the third-biggest market in the world,” he says. “Now it’s fifth behind the UK and France. Two years ago the ratio of blank CDs to recorded CDs was roughly one to one. Now it’s more than three to one. Half of those CDs are used for digital pictures, but the rest are for copying recorded CDs.

“What is now happening, which is very scary, is a deterioration of morals in how the consumer views piracy. They see it as a victimless crime. They don’t feel sorry for the music industry. There has been a change in perception caused by the popularity of blank CDs. People say that if a blank costs 10p, why do recorded discs cost £12? Their answer is that we must be ripping them off. They forget the cost in recording it.

“We cannot see these misguided people simply as thieving bastards — we have to try to educate them and show them how much it’s damaging the cultural environment.”

Larsen cites Africa as showing the worst that can happen if piracy is allowed to run rife. “There was a time when we and other music majors had an office in six or seven African nations,” he says. “Now, there is nothing between the Mediterranean and Johannesburg. We used to record a lot of local music. Now the only way you can hear it is if you go to a bar in Nairobi. There’s nothing wrong with live music, but you can’t share it with the world. So you destroy that cultural diversity in music.”

In the past five years, global sales of recorded music have fallen by more than a third to about $30 billion. The music industry’s response has been to hack into its collective payroll. Universal has shed 2,000 staff over three years and now has 10,000, of whom 6,700 are under Larsen’s control. “We’ve done it very discreetly,” Larsen says, in a jibe at recent cuts announced by rivals such as EMI and WMG.

The industry’s other response to falling sales has been to seek mergers in hope of savings. Universal merged with PolyGram in 1998 to give it almost double the market share of rivals. However, subsequent merger attempts have fallen foul of competition regulators.

Larsen believes, though, that an attempt by Sony and Bertelsmann to merge music divisions, creating a rival with market share equal to Universal, has “a reasonable probability”.

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