From The Times
March 12, 2010

Court bars EMI from selling Pink Floyd downloads

Jack Malvern

Pink Floyd won a High Court battle with EMI yesterday preventing the company from selling album songs as individual tracks.

The band, which signed up with EMI in 1967, also challenged its record label over the level of royalties paid for songs sold online, but that matter remains unresolved.

Lawyers said yesterday that other bands might be examining their contracts to see if they can use similar clauses to regain control of the sale of their music.

The ruling is a further blow for EMI, which lost its chief executive on Tuesday amid suggestions that bands including Pink Floyd and Queen were considering leaving the company.

EMI has suffered strained relations with its artists since it was bought in 2007 by Terra Firma, the private equity group run by Guy Hands. Sir Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones and Radiohead have all quit since the takeover.

Pink Floyd have sold more than 200 million albums during their career and have been one of the company’s most lucrative acts. Sir Andrew Morritt, Chancellor of the High Court, accepted the group’s arguments that EMI was bound by a contract stipulating that written consent was necessary for the sale of its material as anything other than complete albums.

The dispute centred on a line in the contract stating, “there are no rights to sell any or all of the records as single records, other than with [Pink Floyd’s] permission”. EMI claimed that this applied only to physical copies of songs, but the band argued successfully that it also applied to songs sold online. The judge said the purpose of a clause in the contract was to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums”.

However, Pink Floyd’s music will continue to be sold as singles until other disputes between the band and EMI are resolved. Peter Jenner, who managed the group in the 1960s, said that other bands would be likely to benefit from the ruling.

“The decision has far wider implications than it actually appears as it brings a lot of control back to artists with regards to digital sales,” he said.

Mark Krais, an expert on music law at Bray and Krais solicitor, said that Pink Floyd’s contract was likely to be unique to them, but could bear similarities with those of other groups.

“I suspect that there are some other superstar artists from the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties who will be looking at contracts and thinking to themselves, ‘Did I approve for songs to be sold as single tracks as downloads?’. ”

Sir Andrew refused EMI permission to appeal and ordered that it pay the band’s £60,000 legal costs. A spokesman for the company said: “There are further arguments to be heard and the case will go on for some time.”