Individual Pink Floyd songs will soon disappear from online music stores. The British High Court has ruled against EMI, the band's record label, saying that the band's contract requires EMI to "preserve the artistic integrity of the albums." In this case, that means keeping all the tracks together and in the order they were meant to be in, leading some to worry whether Pink Floyd's music will disappear from popular online music stores altogether.

When Pink Floyd signed with EMI back in the late '60s, its members probably did not imagine an age when we would be ditching physical media en masse in favor of cherry-picked songs on a series of Internet tubes. It's unsurprising then that the contract stipulated for the label to maintain the artistic integrity of the album itself—back then (and today as well, but perhaps to a lesser degree), musicians spent painstaking amounts of time crafting the entire album as a whole artwork. Those who only listened to select tracks were totally missing out.

Indeed, as EMI has discovered, that still appears to be the case, at least when it comes to Pink Floyd. The High Court ordered EMI to pay £40,000 in court costs with the possibility of future damages and EMI may have to pull Pink Floyd's individual offerings from places like the iTunes Store and Amazon MP3. (As of this writing, the albums with per-track purchases were still available. Get 'em while they're hot.) In addition, EMI must pay Pink Floyd an undisclosed amount in royalty payments.

This doesn't mean they wouldn't become available again as full-album purchases, though—iTunes, for example, regularly offers albums that have one or two tracks that only come with a full album purchase. We wouldn't be surprised to see Dark Side of the Moon come back to iTunes with every track marked "Album only."