By Eric Pfanner

LONDON — Terra Firma, the private equity firm that recently acquired EMI Group, on Tuesday announced a major restructuring of the music company, saying it would eliminate close to a third of the staff, as it seeks to streamline operations and focus on the discovery of new artists.

The company said the reorganization would bring together all the group’s crucial support activities including sales, marketing manufacturing and distribution into a single division with a unified global leadership.

It said the restructuring would enable it to reduce costs by up to £200 million, or $392 million, a year. It said the changes would also lead to a cut of 1,500 to 2,000 jobs from its global work force of about 5,500. About one-third of the job cuts will be in Britain, EMI’s home market.

The changes “will make EMI’s music more valuable for the company and its artists alike,” the Terra Firma chief executive, Guy Hands, who is also chairman of EMI Group, said in a statement. “The changes we are announcing today will ensure that this iconic company will be creating wonderful music in a way that is profitable and sustainable.”

The planned cuts have unnerved managers of artists signed to EMI, including Robbie Williams and The Verve, who fear that support for their works will falter.

EMI, which Terra Firma acquired last year for £3.2 billion is perhaps the most troubled of the major record companies, which include Universal, Sony BMG, and Warner, all of which are suffering from a continuing, steep decline in sales of compact discs. EMI’s share of album sales in the United States fell to 9.4 percent last year from 10.2 percent a year earlier, according to Music & Copyright.

The job cuts represent a big chunk of employment at EMI Music, the recording division, which has about 4,500 employees and is expected to bear the brunt of the cuts. EMI’s music publishing business, which has performed well, is expected to be less affected.

The cuts would be the second major restructuring for EMI in the last year. In January 2007, the company merged its two main United States labels, Capitol and Virgin, which had operated semi-autonomously, into one unit.

Still, industry analysts say more wrenching changes might have been delayed at EMI as the company spent the last few years in dead-end discussions with another record industry “major,” Warner Music Group, over a possible merger.

Job cuts are a common consequence of private equity takeovers; what is unusual, analysts say, is that Terra Firma has taken several months to detail its plans. When private investors led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. acquired Warner Music Group in 2003, they announced a restructuring plan, including job cuts almost immediately.

Now Warner, with a slightly larger global market share of recorded music — 13.8 percent in 2006, to EMI’s 12.8 percent — has a smaller staff than EMI, having reduced employment to 4,000.

Hands sought to lay the groundwork for the changes announced Tuesday with a campaign of leaks to the British media about supposed excesses by the former EMI management team. These included a £5.6 million townhouse in the exclusive Mayfair area of London that was said to have been used only occasionally by Eric Nicoli, the former chief executive of EMI, along with an annual bill of £200,000 for fruit and flowers at the company’s London headquarters.

Artist managers, including a group referring to themselves as the Black Hand Gang, after the similarly named pre-World War I Serbian nationalists, are angry.

“He has been very vocal to the press about how terrible EMI is, how terrible the staff is,” said Jazz Summers, chief executive of Big Life Management, which works with The Verve and other artists signed to EMI. “When he says things like that it’s obvious he doesn’t have a clue, and that’s demoralizing.”

Amid the turmoil, one high-profile band, Radiohead, has defected from EMI, and others have threatened to follow. Tim Clark, who manages Robbie Williams, who is on a multirecord deal with EMI, has said in British news reports that his client planned to stop working until he got sufficient assurances.