English progressive rock band, Pink Floyd, was anything but “comfortably numb” having just won a momentous legal battle against the EMI record company.
In an “us and them” legal fight, the band won the right to choose whether to keep their albums complete in digital form, or release individual songs – thereby honouring the album’s concept as a whole.
The band’s lawyers argued that under a contract signed between both parties in 1999, the record company was required to sell the catalog of material only as complete albums – including digital formats.
With the advent of the digital age, sites like iTunes and Amazon began offering their customers the ability to buy individual songs in digital format as opposed to having to purchase the whole album.
At the moment, the majority of the group’s songs are currently available individually on iTunes, although a number of them are not. The album-only songs are primarily longer tracks from early in the group’s career.
The ruling involves more than $15 million in allegedly unpaid royalties between the group and the troubled label.