Pink Floyd’s drummer Nick Mason was a guest speaker at Manchester’s In The City music conference over the weekend and in addition to hinting at the possibility of the band reforming for charity concerts, he has also reflected on the court battle the band won against label EMI on London’s High Court in March this year. The ruling was interpreted as a landmark ruling as it prevented EMI from selling downloads of the band’s songs, which the band argued was not taken in to account in their contracts which were last negotiated at the dawn of the internet age. The band had argued that they wanted the albums sold as a whole for artistic reasons and wanted a new royalty rate for download which they argued cost the record company a lot less to distribute and sell.
Mason told a room packed with interested listeners that “Unfortunately, it’s probably useful to a few bands rather than the majority because it is sort of predicated on the importance of the songs being linked to each other. It’s unlikely to help in a number of [other] cases.” Mason continued by saying that his advice for artists entering the industry “always came down to the same thing: safeguard your rights – don’t sign everything away initially, however bad you want that deal.”
