Pink Floyd wins battle with EMI over online sales

"it’s not good news that EMI’s relationship with an artist, especially an artist as prominent as Pink Floyd, should have come into the legal domain.”

No surprise it happened though, that is what you get when you let private equity idiots, whose only business skill is their ability to borrow money, go around buying real companies and then screwing them up with their imaginary business expertise.

If you like a few tracks on an album but you have buy the whole album, then download it. iTunes is great. Buy only the tracks you like.

If the band is willing to live with the reduced amount of royalties in order to maintain their art, I applaud their dedication to their craft. I kind of see it as being the opposite of reality TV show stars on MTV. One puts art ahead of money. The other makes the willingness to do anything on camera for money...into an bizarre art form.

Weird isn't it?

Taka

Good on them. I love Pink Floyd.

Glad they broke down the legal wall built by those corporate pigs and grabbed their money.

Welcome to the machine. Have a cigar. By the way, which one is Pink?

If the band is willing to live with the reduced amount of royalties in order to maintain their art, I applaud their dedication to their craft.

Probably just David Gilmour wanting to do anything to piss off Roger Waters.

Bah.

From an art perspective I have mixed feelings on this; most would agree, I think, that the artist should have control over how their art is presented... and that an artist refusing to allow his/her paintings/songs/film/etc... to be edited, abridged, or otherwise altered without consent would be well within their rights.

On the other hand, art does not really belong to the artist alone, but also to the consumer. While an artist may be able to control the presentation (indeed, that is part of the art), no artist can dictate how his/her art is interpreted or how the media is consumed. Case in point: neither my proud ownership of The Wall nor my respect for Pink Floyd has stopped me from skipping over the tracks I don't particularly care about to get to the ones I like, playing said tracks out of order, putting them on repeat, or even throwing them in a playlist with the works of other artists. Would Pink Floyd be within their rights to demand that radio stations only play The Wall in its entirety or not at all? Similarly should George Lucas be able to insist that Star Wars only be released in box sets containing all six episodes?

From a strictly consumerist prospective, this ruling is a disaster. I resent being forced to purchase content I don't want in order to get to content I do want when said content comes in discrete, self-contained units (in this case, songs). The ability to choose the content, and only the content, I desire is one of the great things about I-tunes. (Personal note: when I was younger I spent a good deal of money buying albums just to get certain tracks, only to be disappointed with the rest of the content. Ironically, now that I have the option not to, I find myself buying more full albums in the hopes of discovering hidden gems...)

Finally, I have to say far from seeing this as a triumph of artistry over corporate greed, as some here would have it, demanding that people buy your entire album because it is a "concept album" comes off as absurdly pretentious. (As pretentious, dare I say, as making a band shattering "concept album" in the fist place? I have to wonder if that, were this not to be Floyd and the masterpiece that is The Wall, but rather, say, Styx's Kilroy Was Here, complete with the 20 minutes of pantomime introduction, whether the support expressed here would be quite so enthusiastic...)

By the way, which one is Pink?

HaHa!!! Ta for the laugh Nessie ;)

Nessie,

Probably just David Gilmour wanting to do anything to piss off Roger Waters.

There's definitely an argument to be made there. Although I watched a recently made documentary on Syd Barrett and the early Floyd years and both Waters and Gilmore spoke kindly of one another in it. Who knows, maybe there's hope for a reunion.

Taka

Triumvere, while I agree in some ways, I do still think that the artist, right or wrong, should have full control over their intellectual property, not corporations. Record companies are distributors and bank rollers, nothing more. And increasing musicians (such as myself) are deciding to do away with them all together.

I like playing Pink Floyd albums out of order sometimes too, but I've always felt like they had a clear idea how their albums should be experienced. On top of that, some tracks are "fillers" in the overall album and selling them individually is a bit of a rip off for consumers, I fell anyway.

Whether we agree or not, hopefully we can agree that it is the artists choice had to sell their product. And in a free market, don't like it, don't buy it.

Luke Lewis, editor of music Web site NME.com, praised Pink Floyd for sticking up for the album.

“It’s a noble last stand,” he said. “ITunes is such a market leader it can bully bands into doing what it wants. It’s good a band like Pink Floyd can use their own clout to fight back.

A noble last stand... A perfect example of winning the battle but losing the war. They've now had their right to keep all the songs bundled together re-affirmed by the courts, but how many people care about "Another Brick In The Wall Pt. 1"? The answer is ZERO. The majority of songs on an album do not become popular - with a few exceptions. Pink Floyd has now stated that you must pay for the dreck along with the good stuff even though the capability to purchase only what you like is out there.

Radio stations NEVER played the albums in their entirety. They only played the songs they liked. Where was Pink Floyd's lawyers whenever THAT happened?

“It’s a noble last stand” for a dying band desperately clinging to a dying medium in the interest of "artistic control". Pink who?

Jay,

Thanks for the reply. I'll agree with you that artists should have the right to determine how their IP is distributed, but with the caveat at just because one has the right to do something doesn't mean they should. I didn't really touch on what rights the labels, producers and distributers should have - that has the potential to be an interesting discussion in and of itself - but rather am more concerned with what artists owe to the consumers who ultimately support them?

As an artist yourself, what - if any - duty do you feel artists have towards their fans? Obviously, it's impossible to control how people feel and think about the music they listen to, or really the way they listen to it... Clearly, in the case of a concept ablum, there is a way that the IP was "meant" to be consumed, and a meaning that was "meant" to be conveyed, but do you feel bands like Pink Floyd or Radiohead should insist on an all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it approach to album sales with the intent of forcing their fans to listen to their music in a certain way? (especially given its been something like 30+ years since the Wall was released, and the songs there in widely distributed?)

As an extention, how to you feel about intellectual property laws? Should the rights to art be held by the artist indefinately? For the duration of an artist's life? Passed from generation to generation? What if the rights are sold or otherwise transfered to the label, or a third party? Should they continue forever, or should, at some point, they become public domain... the property of the fans and the culture? Should Floyd be allowed, a la George Lucas and the new version of the original Star Wars, to go back an make changes to the Wall, and then demand that only the new versions be made available for sale, even though generations gerw up listening to the originals? Is the art, in a way seperate from or even more important than the artist that created it?

On top of that, some tracks are "fillers" in the overall album and selling them individually is a bit of a rip off for consumers, I fell anyway.

I kind of take the opposite view here... If the tracks are "filler" - that is, not really that good - then bundling them as part of an album forces me to buy them when I don't want them, making the album the rip-off. Allowing me to only buy the tracks I like means I can avoid purchasing the ones I don't want. Subjective, I know, but sometimes it feels like bands slap a bunch of sub par tracks together with a few quality ones and then call it an album... Ideally, every album would be listenable from begining to end, but it doesn't always work out that way...

Triumvere

Good points. I will address a few of them. Firstly, I actually make kind of concept albums. I would like people to listen to albums all the way through and check out the art work. Can I force people? No, of course not. But I would rather sell less albums and maybe have the chance for people to experience the music the way I think it should. That may sound pompous to some people, but I don't see it that way. For me, to a person to get the whole picture is more important than selling a catchy single. And if someone steals it, I hope they steal all of it and steal the artwork too, if they are so inclined. I'd rather they payed though.

Duty to fans? Well, this is a tough one. I'm of the opinion it should go in this order 1) the artist 2) the fan (or consumer) 3) money and the company. Fans are important to an artist, but unless an artist is true to themselves, artistically they will produce crap (in my opinion).

Regarding IT laws. Well I might even agree with you there. IT laws for music are a MESS as they stand now. Completely outdated. I've had a lot of frustrations with them myself. For example, I realized a free EP, for promotion, but my coming album won't be free. For my EP, I wanted people to be able to download it for personal use, for free, but still receive royalties for public performance. The truth is this is no law for this. You either have to give it away or demand people pay. Artists choices for how to sell (or give away) their work is very limited. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is famously on the record (as Radiohead is) for his frustration that he couldn't set the pricing and method of his releases (to the point that he encouraged fans to "steal" his albums, to Innerscope Records alarm)

But my main point is artists, in a free democractic market, should be able to sell their work as they see fit. Your George Lucus example is a good. one. I seriously doubt he would sell as many DVDs if he made all six a box set. His sales would suffer. But if that's his wish, then that's his wish. Personally though, I agree, that would be stupid.

I think maybe people like me are behind the times and stubborn. I love the Floyd, and Tool, Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead. I've always thought of an album as one piece of work. If people want their three good singles and a whole rest of an album as a filler, that's fine. But that's not what I'm about. For my coming album, I've had some problems with iTunes, because I want some tracks to be free, but the album as a whole to be one complete download. Again, such an opinion doesn't exist.

The old and general understanding of copy write is that it stands 50 years after the composers death. Then it becomes public property. This I agree with.

However in practice this doesn't always hold true. Trent Reznor (again) doesn't own the rights for his first album, Pretty Hate Machine. Not sure how that happens, but it does.

Pink Floyd are to music what eye charts are to literature - they are doing everyone a favour by refusing to sell tracks