Interesting court case intiated by Pink Floyd against EMI, to prevent the label from selling their songs as individual downloads instead of as an entire album. Apart from the legal merits of either side (though it seems to me that EMI's on shaky ground when it contends that an album is something physical so downloads don't count) there's a broader question of whether you believe the artist or the music fan who gets to decide how a work is experienced. Do you think it's reasonable for a band to stipulate that its fans have to buy the whole work, because each song is part of that greater whole and can't really be understood or appreciated on its own? Or do fans have a legitimate right to pick and choose from the works of an artist they admire?

Perhaps I'm not framing the questions correctly but I think you get the gist of what I'm asking. Interested in getting your thoughts.

My take is that technology and file sharing renders the question academic anyway, given that I can easily download any individual Floyd tracks I want within seconds, and actually did so back in January in order to have a digital copy of "Fearless" to share during one of my better rounds in the Clash of the Decades. But I can appreciate where Pink Floyd is coming from; if any band is an 'album' band, it's them. Just wondering if it's reasonable, given that people are able to access pieces of the whole, that they insist on only selling the whole. Not sure.