Money, it’s a track

UPDATE: Pink Floyd 1, EMI 0.

If ever there was a band that would eschew single-track digital music sales, it would be Pink Floyd. The legendary British band hates single-track sales so much, in fact, that it has sued EMI to stop them altogether.

Actually, the meat of the lawsuit is over how the band’s royalties have been calculated by the label. The sexy part of the suit has to do with unbundled tracks, and Floyd’s case is pretty simple: the prohibition on selling individual physical (i.e. CD, vinyl album) tracks apart from their original albums should extend to the digital realm. EMI, the band’s label, says the prohibition merely covers physical albums, not digital tracks.

To EMI, it’s really a question of how best to monetize a legacy artist’s catalog in a world of plummeting CD sales. Album sales declined more than 12 percent in 2009 compared to a year earlier. Total sales have fallen 52 percent since 2000. One segment that grew — single track downloads — posted an 8.3 percent increase for the year. That was a considerable slowdown from 2008, however, when single track sales shot up 27 percent.

Pink Floyd, signed to EMI in 1967, is the company’s second-most lucrative band after the Beatles. It makes sense that the label would want to slice and dice The Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, and other beloved albums to sell to the 21st-century, short-attention-span music consumer (bedecked in ear buds, an iPod in one hand, iPhone in the other).

To Pink Floyd, I can only suspect that its suit with Britain’s High Court has more to do with artistic integrity than with dollars and cents (or pounds and pence, as the case may be). On a purely aesthetic level, the band’s concept albums were meant to be listened from start to finish in one sitting. If this is the band’s argument, then I certainly admire them for sticking to their artistic guns.

But, let’s face it, folks don’t listen to whole albums that often these days, a sad fact that labels are well aware of. Icons who came up in vinyl’s heyday have found reinvigorated careers (not to mention cash windfalls) as a result of digital music sales. EMI is likely to fight tooth and nail to preserve its right to sell single tracks online.

One way or another, for digital music — a segment that is looking less like the savior of music these days it was supposed to be and more like a wobbly-kneed underdog — this court case could have lasting consequences.