Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ Still Sells Over 10,000 Copies Each Week
September 26, 2011
Most bands would kill to sell 10,000 copies of an album in its first week of release, but
Pink Floyd‘s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ still manages to move that many units each and every week — 38 years after it first was released. And that 10,000 is in a
slow week.
Pink Floyd have certainly earned quite a comfortable living simply off royalties from 1973’s ‘Dark Side,’ but drummer Nick Mason insists the band’s take hasn’t been as massive as one would imagine. “We weren’t some huge big band before ‘The Dark Side of the Moon,'” he
tells the Irish Times. “And because we knew ‘Dark Side’ was never the sort of album you would get recorded in a month, we renegotiated our contract with the label so that we would get more studio time, but at the cost of a lower royalty rate on the album’s sales.”
So Floyd sacrificed long-term profits, but ‘Dark Side’ got made – it took almost a year – and went on to become one of the top-selling albums ever. Mason insists that these days, no other group would be allowed that kinda of time to find themselves in the studio — or put out something as groundbreaking as the record Floyd came up with.
“It was so different, so strange-sounding,” he says. “Pink Floyd were always the outsiders, we were never a Beatles/Stones-type band because we were viewed as being a psychedelic band. And no band today would be allowed to more or less live in a studio for a year just for one album.”
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