Posted by Florian Wardell | 3 comments
Pink Floyd: Albums only
Pink Floyd, I love you. Not only did you revolutionize modern music with your incredible recording techniques and your wonderful, melodious and epic songs, but today, you also gave the music industry a valuable lesson.
See, music stores like iTunes or Amazon are great – the world’s music collection at our finger tips! – but the quantity sometimes overshadows the quality.
Also, standardization, mass production and mass distribution tend to dim an artist’s work. This could first be seen with the apparition of compact disks, which did not feature the beautiful packaging of vinyls. The Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers” zipper, for instance, is just part of the artistic creation.
But it doesn’t stop here. Nowadays, it’s the music itself that suffers. How many of you have single tracks in your music library, taken out of the context of their album, or worse, stuffed into compilations they were never intended for in the first place? I’m not talking about compilations such as the “Buddha Bar” series, which are artfully remixed and carefully produced. No, it’s the “Best of rock 2010″ kind that I’m thinking of.
An album, if you’re past Britney Spears or Blink182 music, is like a book. It tells a story. You wouldn’t buy single chapters of a book, would you? 2 years ago, my former band an I recorded an album. It was pretty simple music, but we really spent a lot of time on it. Anyway, one of the most important decisions we had to make was about the order of the tracks on the CD. It’s not like we wrote an Opera, but we wanted each track to be optimally placed so that the record would stay dynamic and interesting.
And we’re not Pink Floyd. If you know the band a little, you must be aware of their fondness of rock-opera (The Wall) or tracks that flow into one another (Dark Side of the Moon). If any band could justify not selling individual tracks, its Pink Floyd. What, you just want Summer ’69 but not Atom Heart Mother Suite? Come on. Now, you won’t have that option.
Well, good news everyone, Pink Floyd has just won a legal battle with label EMI prohibiting their music from being sold as individual tracks. If you want to listen to Floyd, you’ll be buying full albums.
The ruling was based on a contract they signed way back in 1967, before the internet was a glint in a chubby nerd’s eye. The band argued that the contract contained a clause to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums.” EMI, on the other hand, argued that the contract just referred to physical records, as that’s all that existed at the time. The judge agreed with Pink Floyd.
As of right now you can still grab individual tracks on iTunes, but that shouldn’t last too long. So if you want Pigs On the Wing but not the rest of Animals, now’s your last chance.
Pink Floyd, I applaud you. I hope many other artists will follow suit. Technology should foster art and creativity, not vulgarize it.
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Via Gizmodo
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