Digital downloads of Pink Floyd albums hits a wall

The bad news is that you won't be able to download any Pink Floyd songs in digital formats because its contract with EMI has expired.

If you just got your glitzy iPod and are meandering through iTunes in search of classic Pink Floyd albums like ‘The Wall’ or ‘The Animal’, you won’t get the link. The bad news is that all Pink Floyd albums that came after ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ have been pulled off the digital shelves of retailers like iTunes and Amazon. EMI for long has covered all of Pink Floyd track sales but the contract expired two months ago. A fresh one hasn’t been inked yet. You can still get CDs but that too till stocks last. The Reuter’s news mentions that Pink Floyd's earlier albums - from "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" through "Dark Side of the Moon" – can still be bought on CD and as digital downloads on EMI. EMI has been marketing Pink Floyd albums since 2000 and has seen the sales graph climb. Industry watcher SoundScan says that the label has sold nearly 1.5 million units of their albums in the United States, of which 107,000 have been digital downloads. Just two months before the deal ended, digital downloads of Pink Floyd had a 41 percent share of sales. But now where does EMI go from here? The crux of it would be on how talks between the record label and group fare. Since being taken over by U.K. private equity firm Terra Firma, the music label has seen the departure if bestselling artists like Radiohead and Paul McCartney. The recording label is also under pressure of debt. For now, Pink Floyd is not just another brick in the wall for EMI.