On The Dark Side Of The Moon There's A Pot Of Gold

37 years ago - April 28, 1973 - Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon reached number one on Billboard's Top 100 record chart. It held the position for a week. The album was released in North America March 10, 1973 and this began what would become the longest stay on Billboard's Top 200 chart in popular music history. Dark Side of the Moon remained on the chart for 741 weeks. Do the math. That's over fourteen years. Plus, it has sold over 20 million copies, which puts it in the pantheon of best-selling albums of all time. That's almost one copy for every adult in Canada.

The single "Money" was the catalyst to push the album over the top. It is in 7/4 time, which itself is odd for a hit song. The grand majority of pop hits are written in 4/4 time. The opening cash register and money clinking sounds are also in 7/4 and it's one of the first instances of a tape loop being used in a hit song, or in pop music for that matter. The band used the tempo of the tape loop as a kind of "click track" to ensure the music was in time with the non-musical sounds.

The release of "Money" broadened Pink Floyd's audience to North America and, as a result, British progressive rock became popular on a grand scale. Pink Floyd helped solidify the use of extended song forms, electronic sounds, and tape manipulation and the album is dominated by lyrical themes of insecurity, fear, and the sterility of modern life.

The entire project was carefully crafted from start to finish. Hipgnosis designed the album and the band was hands-on through the entire process. Hipgnosis was responsible for virtually every Floyd album through Animals, but DSOTM was in a lot ways, their crowning achievement. The cover was gatefold, which means it opened up like a book, and it was designed to lay flat in order to display the rainbow/prism. This allowed a "chaining" of covers that created a continuous line of rainbows and prisms. A clever marketing idea used in more than one record store to promote the album. Included inside the album jacket were two posters and two stickers that continued the theme. Even the label was special and did not use the logos from either Capitol Records or Harvest Records.

Incredibly, DSOTM was not Pink Floyd's best-selling album. It's notoriety comes from chart longevity and influence. The Wall, released in 1979, out-sold Dark Side, putting the Floyd in an even smaller group of artists that have more than one album on the best-selling-of-all-time list. The album was recorded in Abbey Road Studios and carrying the engineering tasks was Alan Parsons, who would later form the Alan Parsons Project. Parsons won a Grammy Award for his engineering on Dark Side and would go on to credit part of his success to the album.

Even after 37 years, Dark Side of the Moon remains one of the most popular albums ever. It still sounds new and fresh, and its ever-changing textures and styles really do create a world of their own.

So, in honour of this monumental album, turn on the black light, fire up your audio reproduction device of choice, sit back, and dig the Floyd.

A New Model For The Recording Industry: No More EMI?

EMI is in trouble. The venerable home of The Beatles and Pink Floyd is in dire financial straits, so dire that if the problem is not solved by June it's possible EMI will be bankrupt, broken apart, and pieces of its cadaver sold off to pay its debts. Oh the humanity!

How did the once powerful and influential label get into this situation? Is it the fault of the downloaders? Is it because the private equity owners had no idea about the music business? Was it bad choices by the A&R staff who could not discover anything that would sell? Was it bad marketing? Was it losing Paul McCartney to Columbia in the 1980s? Was it Vanilla Ice?

The answers to these questions would take more time and space than I have available and frankly, I don't know the answers, but they are worth pondering (except maybe the Vanilla Ice one). I have a soft spot for EMI or Capitol Records as they are better known in North America. They are and were the label of The Beatles and Wings. EMI is one of the original record companies in the world, along with Germany's Deutsche Grammophone and RCA Victor in the US. Coincidentally, EMI owns the rights to the iconic "His Master's Voice" label that RCA uses in North America. The Capitol Records building in Los Angeles is as recognizable as the Eiffel Tower. EMI owns Abbey Road studios, that's almost enough right there.

I sincerely hope EMI is saved from disaster. It would be a shame for one of the oldest and influential record companies in the world to slide into recorded music history. If it wasn't for EMI we might not have The Beatles or Pink Floyd or Bob Seger or Anne Murray or The Beach Boys or The Barenaked Ladies, I could on. And who knows the fate of its archive and its current artists if it goes bankrupt? I know the artists that are selling will survive on other labels, it's the marginal or niche artists that will suffer. The archives will most likely vanish into oblivion except for the choice few songs or albums that will manage to be scarfed up by licencing agreements and reissued, repackaged, and repriced. And EMI will become the label that once was.

The most frightening outcome of EMI's demise will be that only three major record labels will be left in the world. Add the fact the majors control over 90% of the market and EMI's failure will seriously impact the diversity of the recorded music available, which in turn will make it harder to find the kind of music you want to hear. And given the proclivity for the labels to cannibalize each other, three will quickly become two.

The end result will be pseudo-individualization at its finest.

Oh noes. Adorno was right!