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Beef Of The Week
CMU Beef Of The Week #10: Pink Floyd v EMI
By Andy Malt | Published on Saturday 13 March 2010
Poor old EMI, nobody loves them. The Sex Pistols once wrote a song saying so, and The Beatles still won’t let the company sell their songs through download stores, even though doing so might help the major record company pay off that four billion dollar loan that is causing them so many problems just now.
This week the record company has been in court with Pink Floyd, who have also taken offence at that whole digital thing. Many artists dislike the fact that, in the digital age, consumers can pick and choose which tracks they buy, rather than forking out for a full album and having the luxury of owning seven songs they don’t like. Radiohead, for example, resisted putting their music on iTunes until 2008 for this very reason. Pink Floyd, always more of a concept album sort of bunch, this week went legal on the matter.
The Floyd said that their 1967 record contract quite clearly states that EMI are not allowed to sell their songs as “single records” without the band’s express permission. But EMI, somewhat optimistically, argued that when they said “records” all those years ago, they obviously meant physical things, like a piece of 12″ vinyl. Downloads, they said, weren’t covered by this clause in the contract, and those Floyd boys were just silly to even suggest such a thing.
But then, surely, if Pink Floyd really had meant “bits of vinyl” when they said “records”, they would have wanted to add many other clauses to cover all future methods for carrying music, like nuggets of code delivered down phone lines. Even though doing so would have blown everyone’s minds like a… like a… erm… like a Pink Floyd album. You might as well start writing clauses about future royalty payments based on currency systems used by Martian music fans who may, or may not, one day be a target demographic for Earth bound music conglomerates like EMI.
The court hearing was closed to the public, so I’m not sure if that’s the exact argument that Pink Floyd’s lawyer used, but the judge agreed with the band nonetheless, and told EMI that they were talking out of their arses. Those may also not be the exact words the judge used, but as I say, we don’t know what was actually said. But when the press and public are kept out, I suspect that’s how judges speak.
So, this means that you can no longer buy Pink Floyd songs as individual tracks on download stores, right? Does it balls. In another move that may be described as astonishing optimism, the label said that the ruling that they were not allowed to sell Pink Floyd songs on a track-by-track basis did not mean that they actually had to stop doing so, because this is all part of a wider contractual dispute with the band which is ongoing.
Still, just in case, if you were thinking about putting together a Pink Floyd Pick-N-Mix compilation, now might be the time to do so.
