Pink Floyd Give In To Digital Downloads

An anonymous reader writes "Tripped out old rockers Pink Floyd have inked a deal with EMI to allow single tracks by the band to be peddled as digital downloads. The remains of the band was in court less than a year ago, arguing that cutting up their albums and selling individual tracks undermined the 'artistic integrity' of their work. Now, though they've given in to the Man, and the likes of Money, Shine on you Crazy Diamond and Comfortably Numb will soon no doubt be available as 99p downloads on iTunes. Have a cigar."

Comments

Ohh I was right!

[Pontiac]

Back when the first case came up I suspected it was a move to get EMI to sign a new contract for digital sales..
In the last case EMI was claiming the old contract only covered album sales and was paying Pink Floyd a lower rate for digital sales.
Looks like the Old Pink pulled it off..

Link to my comment on the first EMI case

Re:Ohh I was right!

[kimvette]

Part of it is in the case of Pink Floyd, the artists actually own their work and the Animals at EMI only had distribution rights - so by distributing it in an unauthorised format EMI could have been screwed to The Wall for copyright infringement, and would have had to Run Like Hell. Instead Pink Floyd said Hey You - Not Now John! When you're One of the Few to retain ownership of your work, you get to say "Get Your Filthy Hands off My Desert, or all that will be on your shelves is Empty Spaces," and the EMI execs, blinking their Paranoid Eyes, had to once again Stop, or risk going to The Trial and end up stuck Outside the Wall.

So, rather than waste a lot of Time Waiting for the Worms to eat their mottled remains, EMI said The Show Must Go On, let's Bring the Boys Back Home to EMI and talk to them In the Flesh and say "Have a Cigar" and relax, and "Wut's uh, the deal?". When Dave, Nick, and Roger arrived, Roger was Fearless and shouted "You Animals must have Brain Damage" to think that we are Sheep who will allow you Dogs to cheapen our work. Then he grabbed the exec and put him in a headlock and started rapping his head, shouting "Is There Anybody Out there? McFly, is there Nobody Home? All I hear is Echoes. One of These Days, I'm Going to Cut You Into Little Pieces!"

Then Roger calmed down and sat down, exhausted. The EMI exect said "Don't Leave me Now; don't let your thinking be Obscured by Clouds. Stay, and we'll talk Money. Why, the Gold, it's in the. . . "

Roger exclaimed "Welcome to the Machine."

Dave interjected "Stop, Roger, don't go Burning Bridges again. The last time it tore the band apart for 22 years!"

Nick, ever the rational one, the only member to be with the band through its entire career, said "Hey You, It's One of My Turns to speak right now, and Let There Be More Light on this subject. Remember, Childhood's End, and we're at Chapter 24 of our careers. If only you would overcome your Flaming temper, we could Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun and watch our sales go into Interstellar Overdrive. Remember a Day before today when we were young and were the Masters of Rock? When we shone like the sun? Today's market is The Thin Ice, or to put it in other words, The Narrow Way, and if we don't let them sell online, you may as well plant us now six feet under in Granchester Meadows."

Re:Netcraft confirms it

[mcgrew]

Damned kids... most of Pink Floyd's songs are far better in context; at least, the later albums (all but the first two).

You won't likely hear Echoes on the radio. Is that one 99c too? It's a whole album side, about 20 minutes long IIRC.

Re:Netcraft confirms it

[chispito]

Netcraft confirms it - album rock and concept albums are officially dead. :(

If one of the two had to die:

1) Good five-minute songs that cost $12 and come packaged with 9 crappy songs

2) Music that is only written and sold in the album format

I'm glad it was #1. Besides, I still download entire albums and listen to the tracks consecutively all the time.

How will they deal with...

[chargersfan420]

How will they deal with songs that run together? Pink Floyd does this a lot. For example, from The Wall, "The Thin Ice", "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)", "The Happiest Days of Our Lives", and "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" should really all be listened to together. I can't imagine anyone actually paying to own just "The Happiest Days of Our Lives", clocking in at just 1:46. Another solid example, from the same album, would be "Empty Spaces" and "Young Lust".

While on the subject, it has long been a pet peeve of mine that music players don't recognize such songs exist and allow you to group them together, so when a random playlist is created, these songs still run together like they're supposed to.

Re:i so don't care

[PatPending]

Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon holds the record for most weeks on Billboard's list (772 weeks). Now get off my lawn.

Floyd lost their integrity 20 years ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

I recognized that Pink Floyd had lost the last remnants of their artistic integrity almost exactly 20 years ago, in January 1991 to be exact. I was in my early 20's and was grocery shopping in a Kroger supermarket in north Dallas when over the store's "Muzak" system they begun to play an elevator-music instrumental version of "Run Like Hell" (from The Wall album). I stopped dead cold in my tracks, and there was a 40-something year old woman a few feet down the isle from me who also stopped dead cold in her tracks. We both simultaneously looked at each other with a huge WTF expression on our faces, then simultaneously looked up at the speakers on the ceiling where this dreadful noise was coming from and then we both shook our heads in complete disbelief, and then walked away carrying on with our shopping. Two strangers in a grocery store, a full generation apart from each other, recognized the death of a music genre. Yes, I know it wasn't Floyd who was performing that dreadful piece of elevator-Muzak, but they certainly allowed their song to be recorded by someone in that horrible manner.