Litigious EMI may have avoided a court showdown with yet another digital music startup (it’s settled a case over lyrics data with TuneWiki), but it’s also fighting a case brought against it by one of its own artists…

Pink Floyd has two beefs, according to some rather bare-bones reporting of Tuesday morning’s initial hearing in London’s High Court…

—PA: “The case concerns how online royalties are to be calculated.”

—And the band also says EMI is breaking their contract by selling individual tracks, unbundled from wider albums.

Aside from that amorphous royalties issue (Bloomberg says “EMI was granted a request to have part of the hearing heard without the media present”), the case illustrates how creative wishes laid down by artists in analogue-era agreements might be trampled over in the online age...

Former EMI band Radiohead, too, complained on both these issues before leaving the label. It was, for many years, creatively opposed to track-by-track downloads, instead preferring whole-album sales, but it’s now relented (indeed, last time around, it even released the individual stem components of songs for fans to remix).

After leaving, in 2008 the band’s Thom Yorke told Wired: “EMI wasn’t giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff. Don’t sign a huge record contract that strips you of all your digital rights, so that when you do sell something on iTunes you get absolutely zero.”

Bloomberg: “Pink Floyd’s contract with EMI says albums are to be sold as a whole with tracks in a specified order and not as singles, Howe said. That should include the band’s music sold online, he said.” But EMI’s lawyer says the stipulation refers to physical, not digital, content.

A court defeat with an accompanying order to back-pay online royalties would be the last thing EMI, with its nightmare financial position, needs.