​Pink Floyd won a ruling at the High Court today which will bar record company EMI selling single downloads from their concept albums.

The band was apparently successful over a challenge on the level of royalties paid by the record company but this part of the judgment was held in secret.

Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt accepted arguments by the group that EMI was bound by a contract forbidding it to sell its records other than as complete albums without written consent.

The judge said the purpose of a clause in the contract was to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums”.

Pink Floyd alleged and EMI agreed that it had allowed online downloads from the albums and had allowed parts of tracks to be used as ringtones.

The record company had argued that the contract related only to physical records and not to online distribution.

Sir Andrew granted the band the declaration they sought – that the contract means EMI is not entitled to exploit recordings by online distribution or by any other means other than the complete original album without Pink Floyd’s consent.

EMI had successfully applied to the court for the royalties aspect to be kept secret for reasons of “commercial confidentiality”.

Lawyers said it was the first time a royalties dispute between artists and their record companies had been held in private, excluding the media and public.

Sir Andrew ordered EMI to pay Pink Floyd’s costs of the case, estimated at £60,000, and refused the company permission to appeal.

Robert Howe QC, representing the group, had told the judge the agreement negotiated in the 1990s contained a clause that prohibited single track downloads without express consent.

It banned what was referred to as “unbundling” – the selling of record tracks, either physically or online – “other than in their original configuration”.

Mr Howe said the band was well known for producing “seamless” pieces of music on albums and “wanted to retain artistic control”.

The dispute involved an agreement reached several years before the download market was launched in the UK by Apple through the iTunes Music Store in 2004.

Mr Howe said both parties had been faced at the time with a whole new world of potential exploitation of music “and quite simply they didn’t know how that would work out”.

He said it would have been “a very odd result” if members of Pink Floyd were able to control exactly how their music was sold as a physical product but there was “a free-for-all with no limitation on online distribution”.

He said: “Prohibition applies equally to the digital product as it would to the physical product, as one would expect from the commercial purpose of the clause. There would be a digital free-for-all otherwise.”

Elizabeth Jones QC, appearing for EMI, disagreed and said the word record “plainly applies to the physical thing – there is nothing to suggest it applies to online distribution”.

Pink Floyd signed with EMI in 1967 and became one of its most lucrative signings, their back catalogue being outsold only by that of The Beatles.

Roger Waters, who co-founded the band with Syd Barrett, Richard Wright and Nick Mason, has a fortune estimated at £85 million, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.