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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."
Money, get back. I'm all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Most music nowadays is bite size but most of Floyd's stuff you really had to listen to the entire Album to appreciate it. But it's a new world, I suppose, and if people want to listen to just one song from the Wall randomly mixed in with Britney Spears and Lady Gaga then power to the people.
They're not greedy - they just need to pay for their kids' college educations.
How can ye have artistic integrity if ye won't allow downloads?
How can ye have downloads if ye don't have artistic integrity?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's always strange for me to listen to Pink Floyd songs out of context from the rest of the album. It probably stems from listening to those albums start to finish in my youth, and many of the songs blending in to one an other. For example, at the end of Dark Side of the Moon, "Brain Damage" flows directly in to "Eclipse," and separating those two tracks should be illegal.
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
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
...make great complete albums.
(to be fair, pink floyd usually does. or at least did before I was born.)
Listening to an artist and a record company bicker over money by using "artistic integrity" is like listening to two hipsters argue by calling each other "hipster."
If your albums are such unsulliable masterpieces that should never be altered by the mere mortals that exist outside of a studio, then why release singles in the first place (granted, Pink Floyd doesn't often cut singles, but they have)? Why let other bands cover individual songs from your albums? Why slap together a greatest hits or box set package?
I really wish some artists would climb down off their high horses. At some point down the line, you made a conscious decision that playing in front of 30 people in a shithole bar in your hometown wasn't for you. Sadly, some of the bleacher seat dwellers from those bar days decided that choice makes you worthy of the moniker "sellout." You know what? Screw those selfish people. They're still sitting at the end of that bar, and they're not you. But with the ability to reach a mass audience comes a certain sacrifice. Well, not so much sacrifice as trade. You trade the ability to control every sniggling little detail of how the audience should perceive (and, to some extent, enjoy) your work in exchange for a heck of a lot more people getting to enjoy your work. Oh, and you get paid a bit better. Your audience now includes folks that just want the one little song they know & care about, and it'd be nice if you the artist would accept that not everyone thinks every last aural dripping of yours is solid gold.
Pink Floyd. Radiohead. Kid Rock. There's plenty of artists that just need to suck it up and accept that the world has changed. Consumers have picked up the tiniest inkling of purchasing power over the music industry, and we're going to use it. Call it packback for a lifetime of 20 bucks for an album with three worthy tracks.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
... then I saw your face, and you're a belieber ...
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
when they start getting bigger royalty checks (assuming they get something from EMI) due to increased downloads of single tracks and not whole albums.
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.
Free Martian Whores!
They are completely right that it does undermine the integrity of their albums, but they really lost that fight as soon as radio stations were playing individual tracks.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
What is this, a contest to see who's worse? They didn't have to change their stance; the court case was over. IMO they lost integrity by doing so.
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
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.
Most music nowadays is bite size but most of Floyd's stuff you really had to listen to the entire Album to appreciate it.
I agree that albums can yield a greater experience but how is buying a single different than listening to a single on the radio?
Also can't a single be a "preview" of some kind, inspiring the listener to *eventually* buy the album?
I hear Echoes on the radio from time to time. The other day I heard Free Four on the radio as well. I hadn't previously heard that on the radio since I was a toddler. Sometimes the local classic rock station plays some of the longer and also the lesser known gems from Pink Floyd (like Fearless). On occasion they'll actually play Shine On You Crazy Diamond in entirety. More often you hear the staples though: Comfortably Numb, Run like Hell, Wish You Were Here or Welcome to the Machine, or on rare occasion Hey You and possibly The Happiest Days of Our Lives/Another Brick in the Wall Part II.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Well, Pink should have realized long ago (like everyone else) that selling a single will attract more to buying the album than just selling the album alone.
And if that doesn't happen for a certain percentage of the audience, so what? They are not harmed by someone who does not happen to see the beauty of the whole album.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
What makes you think they care? They've made their money, millions and millions, maybe they really do care more about the presentation than anything else at this point (maybe they always have). Pink Floyd albums are about the concept, not the song. Try putting a few Floyd albums into your MP3 player and hitting shuffle....it's FUCKING HORRIBLE. Songs cut off seemingly in the middle, 10 second tracks of people shouting pop up out of nowhere, it's a mess. If you listen to them as albums though, it's a totally different experience (and IMHO a pretty great one).
There are tons of bands that put out good stand-alone songs, but it's just not really what Pink Floyd does. If I were them, I'd push to keep the albums together, and sell only the songs that worked as singles back when they were released individually, things like Money, Comfortably Numb, Run Like Hell. It just doesn't make sense to buy most of Pink Floyd's music as individual tracks.....
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
Exactly. Pink Floyd's discography is largely made up of concept albums. While some single tracks are enjoyable out of context, nothing compares to the actual album. Of course, kids nowadays are used to albums full of shit with only one or two tracks even worth listening to...
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
....oh sorry wrong thread
When they dumped Syd. Yeah, that's when it happened.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Roger Waters has owned the rights to "The Wall" since 1987, not Pink Floyd.
That Libertarians are like Jehova's Witnesses---they're so desperate to get a word in, they'll even reply to a sig!
Syd died in 2006, far too late for them to learn anything from his death. They were scared into avoiding drugs by Syd's descent into psychosis triggered by his heavy LSD use, not by his death. Gilmore was Syd's replacement.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Bands cannot control who does cover versions so long as the musicians doing the cover pay the fees. There is no copyright veto against it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Side_of_the_Moon
The singles were released well after the album charted, BTW. There were a few Pink Floyd singles but very few of them, and they really were not contributing factors to the albums' successes.
What made Pink Floyd successful was once they achieved a certain level of success in England they had the attitude of "fuck it" where the labels were concerned, and did what they wanted - and what they wanted to do was avant guard experimental music.
Some might hate the Ummagumma studio record but I love it for its uniqueness, that it is so out there, but that they manage to achieve such ethereal and non-traditional sounds and yet still arrange them into musical works. They had an entire album side where each member could do whatever the heck struck their fancy at the moment, and a lot of the stuff is fantastically weird, but in a good way.
And strangely, Pink Floyd have mastered balancing complexity and simplicity, never quite taking it "over the top" like Queen did, keeping the composition as a whole in mind, especially with their longer pieces and with Meddle, when they started delving into the "concept album" idea. Now, some of it did get a little whiny due to Roger's daddy issues, but they are still quite good. One vastly underrated work is "the final cut" which is actually quite good. It's missing Rick's keyboard work so it is missing the signature Pink Floyd sound and ambiance, but if you consider it a Roger Waters solo work (which it pretty much is thanks to his egomania at the time) it's likely his best solo work to date.
Meddle? The track Echoes is orgasmic to listen to. IMHO, it is one of the best tracks ever recorded. The way I can think of to best describe Pink Floyd is as a modern take of classical, where the pieces can be long and there can be a lot that is complex, but that there is a consistency to it that is missing from a lot of today's mainstream pop.
That's not to say that they are like Metallica where everything since the black album sounds like the black album. It's more that there is a quality and presence to Pink Floyd's work where you can hear a measure of a work from them and know it's them, even if you had never heard that work before. A lot of that has to do with Wright's talent on the keys as a Jazz musician, but it also has to do with their focus on a good, clean sounding production (the engineering aspect of the recording).
I really hope that the labels haven't lost sight of the potential this kind of music has. It certainly doesn't earn a quick buck and requires a big investment and 2-3 albums that might flop, but once the work gains notice it could very easily become a dinosaur.
Singles are not necessary. A great album can sell itself. The problem is the labels are unwilling to take such risks - they can't see the HUGE profits past their greed.
And as far as selling out is concerned, and the issue being over money rather than integrity? They were offered $100mil each to tour after 2005. They turned the money down, saying they would do more charity gigs but not tour. Those guys don't need money when they're each earning millions per MONTH from record sales alone, let alone current projects and investments, and licensed works. Once you're making a million a year, or ten million, or whatever, what's a million more? Money that will just sit, or you'll just blow on useless crap, or give away/donate.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
depends what you listen to. some bands actually have more than an albumsworth in them. others got signed before they had enough good material and were contractually obliged to release an album (a friend of mine was on this rollercoaster - the music industry really is a bit of a digestive tract for talented people to be processed into a uniform paste)
Meddle? The track Echoes is orgasmic to listen to. IMHO, it is one of the best tracks ever recorded.
If you haven't already, find a copy of Live at Pompeii. My copy is my wife's - her family owned a mom-and-pop video store and she kept the copy when it folded.
Here, check this out:
Part 1
Part 2
As creepy/beautiful as this song is, playing it to an abandoned amphitheater on the ruins of Pompeii just multiplies the awesome. There is some studio footage of the original scoring of Us and Them too. It's fantastic to watch.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
kids these day? you mean ALWAYS.
With rare exception, pretty much every album is a couple of good songs, and a bunch of shit.
Pink Floyd was one of the exceptions.
The Wall came out in 1979 look at these other hits:
http://www.musicoutfitters.com/topsongs/1979.htm
My Sharona, the knack. That song s good but that album is hardly 'a work' in and of itself.
Her i a list of the albums for 1979:
http://cashboxmagazine.com/archives/70s_files/1979YEAP.html
SO it is as it's always been: a few great pieces of music, and some great singles, and mostly crap that will be laughed at in 5 years.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
comfortably numb is actually quite jarring when it comes in on the album.
That's because it is a beacon of Gilmour cast adrift in a wallowing sea of Waters angst.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
You ripped the CDs? Real Floyd fans rip the vinyls.
I know this post is meant tongue in cheek but I've seen a couple of posts pointing to the idea of Floyd having exceptional sound. This is plainly not true. PF is fantastic, yes. PF is much more involved than most of their peers, yes. PF is an audiophile band? Um, no.
I love Pink Floyd. I really do but Floyd has plenty of flaws in most of their recordings. Many of their recordings come off as abysmally dated by virtue of the recording quality. I think Floyd got their reputation largely from people who wanted prog rock without having to listen to Jon Anderson's voice. When it comes down to it Yes has much better sound engineering and much more complex music to offer. Not that Yes is a better band but they come off in spades with all the virtues that everyone likes to pin on Pink Floyd being the masters of.
Again, it's nothing against Floyd but they weren't the pinnacle of sound engineering and complexity in rock. Sad but true.
that you don't know much about Pink Floyd. They could go on tour with insane ticket prices and still sell out every venue, no problem, but they don't. Much of their music is actually about the revulsion of that motivation in the industry ("Have a Cigar" is exactly about this). Also, Pink Floyd owns their music. This was to pave way for a 5 year distribution contract, as the previous one (from '99 I believe) expired.
I think rjmx was talking about physical mp3 players. I know my 128MB player, which I got when they started appearing in shops 'round here (I hated the width of the discman, but wanted something to replace my walkman) did play them in alphabetic order. I used to rename the tracks on the device by album & track order, with the first letter for the album and the second for the track. Ended up writing a script to do it (in PHP - I used Windows at the time and hadn't learned Python or Perl yet).
Dilbert RSS feed
and again, careful with those tracks, eugene!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I rather suspect that one who describes something as "lugubrious" on an Internet forum has no business calling anything else "pretentious". Besides, I rather enjoyed "Shine on you crazy diamond" (as well as the rest of "Wish You Were Here" for that matter).
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Floyd are whores, Gilmour is a whore - Waters is out whoring his whore ass doing the Wall again and again, which he retained the rights to in his lawsuit over the Floyd name....
Which one is Pink?
Be seeing you...
I have thus far not purchased Guitar Hero mostly because of the same reason I don't buy albums these days, a few good songs and a bunch of crap. A Pink Floyd version would be awesome, but then I don't know how well it could really be done in Guitar Hero. Most of David Gilmour's solos are not particularly fast paced, which is one of the things that guitar hero hinges on. All of Gilmour's work from a guitar player's point of view is just amazing. He does something interesting to EVERY SINGLE NOTE. Bend up, bend down, hammer on, pick rake, harmonic, etc. There is simply no way to try to emulate that by mashing buttons.
About 10 years ago, I learned all of the guitar parts on The Wall, Wish You Were Here, Dark Side of the Moon, The Final Cut and Animals, and that really felt like an accomplishment. I can't play it as well as David Gilmour, but I would feel like mashing buttons on guitar Hero would be a mockery.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
45's are akin to a modern single track download from a track standpoint, but from a sound quality standpoint, a modern digital download is the opposite of the 45. The higher spin speed of the single offered higher fidelity as you traversed a longer linear distance in the same amount of time. Whereas a digital download sometimes, but not always is at a decreased bitrate from the original recording.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
"mechanical license" is the name for the concept mentioned by some sibling posts: once the song's been released, you can get rights to cover the song by just paying the rate set by law once you notify the song publisher.
(9.1c plus 1.7c for each minute or partial minute above 5 when selling recordings, AFAIK)
This is in the hands of the publisher (or ASCAP,BMI or some group like them); Pink Floyd may have ceded some rights over the songwriting itself to them.
You can agree to other terms with the rightsholders, of course.
The compulsory license is a useful limit on copyright-law monopoly abuse, as well as Campbell vs. Acuff Rose [that parody case also clearly adds free-speech issues into the mix.]
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The real question is why you have the right to take the right away from me to copy your work? If you don't want to give it up, you should never perform it. But since you performed it, why should I'm not be able to copy your work? I'm not stealing anything from you, you shared it with me. But after you shared it with me, you turn around and forbid me to copy and modify your work or share the copy with others.
It's like a carpenter forbidding me to make a copy of his chair after he shows me the char. Where does this moral came from?
Only because with the new technology innovation that I can copy and share your work perfectly to others you try to label me as a thief or pirate. Why you don't share it with others so I don't have to?
Don't try to make copyright any special right that belongs to you as a human right.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute