Pink Floyd Turns Tables, Scr*ws the Record Company

Pink Floyd is not scr*wing the record company.

They are insisting that the record company honor its contract, nothing more and nothing less.

Given that the company had lawyers and assorted other smart business type guys, you can hardly say they entered into the contract naively.

Therefore ... ain't no scr*win' goin' on.

Assuming a dozen tracks per typical album, at $1/track, that's $12 to download the entire album.

But only $4 to download "The Wall", and $2 to download "Dark Side of the Moon".

I'd say the company was naive to assume that the distribution model would remain forever the same.

But that's different from getting scr*wed. They agreed to it with open eyes. If they didn't look far enough down the road, so be it.

The more likely truth is that very few pop artists/albums/songs remain valuable past the year they hit, so...anything they get now is gravy to the company anyway.

> The more likely truth is that very few pop artists/albums/songs remain valuable past the year they hit, so...anything they get now is gravy to the company anyway.

It would be interesting to know what the record sales residuals are to P.F. as individual band members, after all the deductions, fees and whatever that the record company gets.

_Dark Side of the Moon_ was on the sales charts for a decade, but did the band members themselves see all that much of it?

Curiosity abounds.

Oo, residual sales is a hot and cranky topic for both music and books. Because even when there is still demand, record companies and book publishers have this funny habit of not keeping titles in print and available to eager money-spending fans. And then the suits whine about how nobody is buying anything. In the olden days they would drag their feet until copyrights or contracts expired, then do re-releases and greatest hits compilations without having to pay the artists. Perhaps this new era of infinite copyrights is biting back a little, at least for re-releases.

Quoting:It would be interesting to know what the record sales residuals are to P.F. as individual band members, after all the deductions, fees and whatever that the record company gets.

As individual members it'll be Roger Waters that gets the majority of the money, it's the songwriters who tend to be the big earners. Dave Gilmour will get some song writing money and the others will get what you might call dregs. As Floyd are such a big selling band those dregs'll be pretty good earnings though I'd guess! Nick Mason ha s a big collection of cars that can't be cheap!

The Smiths had bitter court proceedings over song writing credits. Morrissey and Marr left Joyce and Rouke with very little money while the former two are rather well off.

> Nick Mason ha s a big collection of cars that can't be cheap!

Oh, I never said I didn't think they made money, I just mean what is record sales money and not from performance ticket sales.

It was a long honeymoon for musicians in terms of making money from sales of shellac, vinyl and compact discs.

Quoting:It was a long honeymoon for musicians in terms of making money from sales of shellac, vinyl and compact discs.

Once the engineers created a uniform manufacturing process. Before that, every record made required a live performance.