Money! Pink Floyd Stays at EMI–and iTunes.

@Peter Kafka

As a hack journalist you probably wouldn’t care if your articles were published with all the words sorted into alphabetical order, so long as you get paid. Integrity clearly means nothing to you.

But these guys are artists, as well as rather shrewd business men.

They wrote their works to be listened to in a context, and much of it works less well without that context. Allowing that reduces it’s perceived value. And their long term income. They had every right, morally and legally, to prevent that.

So whether or not it rings true to you, for whatever value of true you use, is a matter of supreme indifference.

They’re not news monkeys with a 24 hour interest horizon. They’re in no hurry for your 95c. One day you’ll grow up and pay your $15

EMI like all record labels, are irrelevant, and can’t seem to move forward with the times. Daryl Hall (a contemporary age wise of Gilmour and Waters) “tours” by broadcasting live, vital, music over the internet, and Phish allow their fans to join them at concerts even if they live half way around the world.

I am amused and a bit disconcerted that the writer thinks breaking up the tracks is a good thing, or “an awful lot” to ask of the listener!

As the poster below mentioned, would you buy a single scene from a movie? Or a quarter panel of a great painting? Are we such an ADD addled society that no one can focus for more than three minutes? Singles only please! Next !

This won’t revive EMI, nor benefit younger generations looking for a musical artistic experience with continuity.

With all due respect, what is wrong with the music business is bad music, and mediocrity in artistic, sound, and production standards… not the “lack of choice”. If you put out something great, it resonates with people and has a life of it’s own.The album has been in the charts for 741 weeks.Not singles from the album, the album.

Interesting that you question the motives of the band, and you imply that Floyd need EMI and iTunes more than EMI needs the band.

This may have been true 25 years ago, but the digital age has thrown all the old school paradigms out.You don’t need EMI when you have Pro Tools, a laptop and internet promotion and distribution.

I understand the perspective you are writing from as a business based writer, but no one is going to come to Coltrane, Beethoven or Pink Floyd based on hearing a snippet.

Re: “forced album splitting”… Based on comments above, perhaps it should be a matter of precedent. I.e., if a song was released as a single, for whatever reason (radio, a TV show, etc.), only those tracks are made available for individual download. It would be a shame, if someone was presented a Floyd track randomly (via a “others who bought this track also bought…” sort of function, or a person picks a track because they like the title, or whatever), and it happened to be a quick instrumental, or a track from The Wall, for example, that makes no sense whatsoever out of context and was never intended to be listend to by itself. That experience could easily turn someone off instantly.

It’s horrible that we influence pop musicians today to produce every individual track to serve as its own entity. Bands like Floyd wouldn’t exist, had they not been given the freedom to explore these “concept albums”, which inevitably include individual tracks that are hardly fair representations of the group’s work, by themselves.

I agree with the movie analogy. Imagine distributors insisted upon selling DVD chapter-by-chapter, so people could download only the scenes they want. Would the studios want to make -every- scene of the movie available, or would they demand to pick and choose from the scenes that best represent the gist and quality of the whole movie?

I see no problem with any musician wishing to control how its art is presented. If they make a bad choice, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot, right? I don’t fault EMI for their perspective (they exist to make money), but PF’s desire is completely legitimate, IMO.

If you had lived through the era when the album became more than a “collection of singles” you couldn’t possibly be ambivalent about the concept.

Granted, The Beatles “did fine” by becoming international pop stars and “wrote swimming pools” (hit songs), but even they realized that you don’t grow as an artist churning out single pop hits.They were miserable touring ,quit and challenged themselves in the studio. John Lennon didn’t write “Help” because he was happy and doing fine.

Otherwise, without artistic growth we wouldn’t have “Sgt. Pepper”, which in turn (arguably) gave us “Dark Side” and many other thematically weaved song suites. ( A great cult record that illustrates this is the legendary first album by super-group Captain Beyond.)

Again you argue that without paid single downloads, (broken up from a thematically weaved album) the poor consumer is somehow bound and chained.That couldn’t be further from the truth.

You can listen to whole albums on YouTube, stream a documentary or concert video from the cloud via Netflix , and there is Spotify which is a legal service that allows live streaming of songs or whole albums.

(Spotify isn’t in the United States yet, as companies like EMI try to squeeze every last cent through paid download services.)

I would argue that there is more choice than ever, single downloads have nothing to do with it.

I AM prejudiced pro Pink Floyd,because there is PAYBACK with higher artistic standards.

As Music critic Jon Pareles stated recently:

“LATELY I’ve been having a recurring sinking sensation. A hit on the radio gets my attention and doesn’t repay it; it adds up to little more than a dull thumping Eurodisco beat and a robo-tuned voice repeating an inane hook, something like the “Ay-oh, gotta let go,” in Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite,” or Justin Bieber piping, “Baby, baby, baby, oh” or the Black Eyed Peas chanting “Imma Be” more than 100 times (though at least that song goes through some rhythm changes). “