Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)Pink Floyd doesn’t want you to buy their songs
It’s “A Great Day For Freedom”—at least for the members of Pink Floyd. As BBC News reports, the band has emerged victorious in a legal battle with record label EMI, accompanied by a ruling that could soon lead to the band’s entire discography getting pulled from iTunes.
Pink Floyd’s original contract with EMI—inked before the rise of iTunes and Amazon and their ilk as modern purveyors of digital music—included a clause that Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt says requires that EMI “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums.” The court’s interpretation was thus that EMI may not distribute Floyd tunes “by any other means other than the original album, without the consent of Pink Floyd.” That means no more integrity-busting individual tracks.
(I’ll spare you the rest of Macworld’s “clever” article which spared no Pink Floyd song-name pun.)
Pink Floyd, who haven’t written a notable song since —when? the late ’70s? Maybe the 80s? — would like to travel back in time to a land before the iTunes and Amazon’s MP3 store, and The Internet.
They sound every bit as delusional as JK Rowling who refuses to release her books on Audible.com but will make CDs of them, ensuring that no piracy will ever take place.
All they have done, in fact, is make sure that no one will pay for an individual track, which will be uploaded moments after it goes on sale, and which will have high demand given that they are not otherwise available, thus ensuring that it will be pretty easy to find a copy.
In short, Pink Floyd has made great strides towards “artistic integrity” today, at the cost of actually getting paid for their work. Well done, gents.
Anyway, you might want to cherry pick your favorite songs on iTunes or Amazon while you’ve got the opportunity.
