Dark Side of Digital Rights

Pink Floyd just won a law suit in Britain over digital distribution of individual songs from "The Dark Side of the Moon"

Floyd's label EMI owns the rights to the album, but the contract giving them those rights requires that EMI "preserve the artistic integrity of the albums." For the album Dark Side of the Moon there are songs that run into each other without the more typical silent pause so the band (or it's lawyers) had a pretty good case - good enough to win, forcing EMI to withdraw individual songs from the market. The songs were still available today, so if you hurry - you can mess with the bands artistic integrity.

I favor artists in these disputes for the most part, since the labels have a terrible history of taking advantage of the artists in both legal and illegal ways. The subject is amazingly complex, though: each country has different laws, the contracts between bands and there labels are each unique, and these sort of issues weren't anticipated in the sixties. Somewhere in the nineties many record companies started adding appropriate clauses. Appropriate clauses from the record companies point of view, anyway, since they were often "we get the rights to the album and to all digital versions of any and all songs included."

Even when the record companies agreed to pay the artists for the electronic distribution these agreements usually allow the record company to subtract their costs first, only paying the artists after all costs were covered. Via creative accounting the costs were often grown so huge that many artists with successful records never saw a dime from the record company; mostly they get their money (after the initial chunk for agreeing to sign) from revenues derived from performance fees paid by radio stations and from live performances.