Album rips

[Prolix]

Have you ever noticed how crappily people rip their music? Even the online mp3 retailers do it. Take for instance Tales of Mystery and Imagination by The Alan Parsons Project. Track number six is 'The Fall of the House of Usher' a 15 minute song with 5 parts. Use just about any ripping software and that one song suddenly become five. If you look for it on Itunes you will see it as five separate songs. This is consistently the case although there may be exceptions. I don't know about you but if I set my player to play randomly I want it to play that song from start to finish and not bits of it here and there in no particular order. Another example is Elton John's first song from Blue Moves, A minute and a half of "Your Starter For..." leading directly into "Tonight" with no dead air between. Not quite as bad but they are meant to be played together.

[zanzibar]

It's actually pretty common on CDs of classical music for different movements to have different tracks.  If a rock album adopts a classically inspired form (in your example, the track is divided into Prelude, Arrival, Intermezzo, Pavane, and Fall), it's only to be expected that the publisher will use convention.

Compare it to "Yes Sir, I Will" by Crass.  No problem there.

[Prolix]

Well a youtube video is not really the same as an mp3 file.
Here we go from

The record consists of one continuous piece of music spread over the two sides of the original vinyl release (the CD release split the album into 7 tracks)

That is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about, if you rip it it will be 7 files not one. If you rip the vinyl it will be two, I'd imagine, one for each side unless there is silent spaces one each side that might indicate different tracks.

"Thick as a Brick" by Jethro Tull is two tracks, one for each side although conceptually it is one song.

[zanzibar]

Well a youtube video is not really the same as an mp3 file.
Here we go from

The record consists of one continuous piece of music spread over the two sides of the original vinyl release (the CD release split the album into 7 tracks)

That is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about, if you rip it it will be 7 files not one. If you rip the vinyl it will be two, I'd imagine, one for each side unless there is silent spaces one each side that might indicate different tracks.

"Thick as a Brick" by Jethro Tull is two tracks, one for each side although conceptually it is one song.

If you rip a vinyl record, you might have trouble listening to it in the future.

They adopted a classical form by subdividing the song into different pieces.  The publisher merely followed the convention.

[Prolix]

Classical forms are discrete units, one movement  will be separate from the next. You wouldn't expect to see further division although it is quite likely that a default rip with a standard software might well do so.

Consider this album It was originally on vinyl, a double album. The track listing indicates twenty one tracks while in reality the first album has four songs two of which are extended medleys, based on "Paint It Black" and "Nights In White Satin," respectively. Side three is another medley taking up the whole side. starting with "Sun/Moon" and ending with "Jimbo" and side four has three individual tracks. So actually those twenty-one tracks are only eight. So at $0.99 a track they can charge $13 dollars more and you get those awkward transitions where the tracks were artificially sliced.

They adopted a crass commercial form, the classical form is discrete units that can be played on their own.

[zanzibar]

Keep in mind that a CD is made to be sold as a CD.  If it's tracked a certain way, it's going to be ripped a certain way unless whoever is ripping it puts extra effort into it.