Times change, don't they?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/09/pink-floyd-emi-battle-gro_n_491696.html

It's fair to say that the band Pink Floyd is one of the all time best selling musical acts ever.  But even they have to deal with the new reality of the music industry.  As convenient and great as it is to have your entire music library on a rectangular device not much bigger than a wallet, it also presents those pesky unintended consequences.

Music is far too easy to post online and "share" illegally.  ITunes and Amazon have made it possible for people to simply buy one or two songs and ignore the rest of an artist's album (sometimes, I'll readily acknowledge, this can be for the best.  There have been plenty of albums I've bought that, in the end, only featured one or two songs I've liked.  Red Ryder's As Far As Siam is perhaps one of the more prominent examples, at least to me, of this).

And these problems are spilling to other artistic endeavors.  Films are showing up online for illegal download even as they first hit (or before they first hit!) the theaters.  Books are also showing up (I've mentioned before the heartbreak of finding that my own novel, Mechanic, showed up at one of those file sharing services and has been downloaded a criminally large amount of times...potential earnings for a work I sweated plenty on creating that I've subsequently lost out on).

I don't know where we'll eventually wind up regarding earnings artists should be making off their works.  The cat, as they say, is out of the bag now and its almost impossible to police all the file sharing services out there, just as it is also difficult for artists, even well known artists such as Pink Floyd, to deal with the company they work for.

As for that Red Ryder song?  Find it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp9852hq0W0