jon_chaisson | RTS Presents: Return of the Singles?

[NOTE: I find that Sundays are perfect for me to do some introspective writing on various things, as a)neither Emm nor I have anywhere pressing to go right away, and b)I really need to more writing of some kind. I want to see if I can make it a habit of writing an RTS Presents article more often, perhaps once a week or every other week. We'll see...]

Okay, so dealing with the "Ubseshun" I'd posted about a few days ago, about the Yahoo Music News article questioning whether getting rid of singles back in the day was a good idea or not.

The article itself is an interesting diatribe about how the advent of downloading songs has pretty much replaced going out and buying the single in the music biz. First of all, I have to say that in all honesty, the change was so slow and deliberate that it wouldn't surprise me if not a lot of people would have immediately made that connection. Sure, some may have thought that with the ever-increasing presence of downloading sites and programs like iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, MusicMatch and so on, they could just snag the one song rather than going to the local record store and buying the whole album.

As I recall, the slow and deliberately planned disappearance of the single dates back to the late 90s. When I started at HMV in 1996, we had a section in the store (right near the registers actually, not only for impulse-buy purchases but also so we could keep an eye out for thieving scalawags) that had to be regularly restocked. Most of the singles sold well, priced at $1.99 for 2-song cassingles, $2.99 for multi-song cassingles and 2-song cd singles, or $5.99 for EP-length cd 'maxi-singles.' I remember two distributors, Sony and PGD (now part of Universal), constantly offered a 99-cent single, usually of a big hit song, which always sold well. We also carried the import single, mostly sold at a higher $9.99 and therefore not the biggest seller unless it was a rarity.

We learned pretty quickly to keep stock of normal-sell singles at about five or six copies, but to order quite a few of the big pop hits (*NSYNC and Spice Girls sold insane amounts, both as domestic and import), as they always sold well. And anytime we had random extra copies, throwing them on the point-of-purchase shelves at the register was also a good idea. Any time we had an overstock of singles that never sold, which was a normal occurrence, we could send them back for credit, either to the distributors themselves, or to Valley Media, a great wholesaler we ordered indie-label titles from and who could turn around titles like no tomorrow (read the story of their eventual and sad demise here). The singles racket wasn't exactly a cash cow, but it was good for pushing the overall gross the store would pull in.

As I remember it, the typical lifespan for a single was usually anywhere between two weeks and a month. Rarely would it be over that. Obviously, it would closely follow the set rotation at the local radio stations, so it was pretty easy to guage after awhile. A really crappy song would only garner two or three buys whereas something great would sell out on the first day. I can proudly say that I anticipated the selling of *NSYNC's import single "Bye Bye Bye" (which had been released a good month before the album No Strings Attached came out) by ordering one hundred on the initial order--which sold out within a week, even despite its $8.99 price sticker. The next rush-order was upped to three hundred, which also sold quickly. That was definitely a fluke, as this had happened much later after the singles market was shrinking, but it was also an example of how singles were correctly sold for maximum profit at that point in time. Nothing sells quite like a preview single does. It's like today's "leaked track" online.

Anyway, I have to say the change in the singles market started taking place about the same time the various corporate shake-ups in the music biz were happening. PGD (PolyGram) was bought out by Universal and while many bands were taken on by UNI, a good number of them were unceremoniously squeezed out of the majors, either end up on an indie, or release import-only, or to simply break up. During this time, other majors were pruning bands--and sometimes labels--to save money. Some indies were also being bought out by other indies, with even more bands and labels vanishing. It wasn't a pretty time to be a band at that point, unless you already had a large following.

But it wasn't just the corporate world...the overall atmosphere of music was changing. Alternative rock had gone from grunge in the early 90s to radio-friendly alt.rock in the mid-90s, and into rap-rock and industrial in the late 90s. We'd gone from Nirvana and Pearl Jam to Collective Soul and Radiohead to Limp Bizkit and Korn. And with that, the single just wasn't something that that crowd was really into, unless they were a completist looking for a rare single-only b-side. The pop world had also started to change from catchy pop and soul to rap and kitschy europop one-hit-wonders. We'd gone from Spice Girls and En Vogue to Wu-Tang Clan and Aqua. For some it seemed that things were going from radio-friendly to controversial because it was the rebellious thing to do. For others, like myself, it seemed that rebellion and flash had become much more profitable than musical creativity. In a way, it was my first instance of noticing the inevitable--that I was getting old and that I felt the next generation's taste in music was crap. ;)

Meanwhile, singles kind of vanished at this point. It had become de rigeur to have the radio hit, but not to release a single for it, as a shameless ploy to get the music-buying public to buy the whole album. For a brief time, my status as import buyer was pushed up because the UK still released some of these singles, a lot of them with rare b-sides. For most, that was the only way to ONLY buy the single. It wasn't long, though, before the customers figured out that they'd be spending the same amount of money on the full album instead. Our singles section shrank to about half the size it was, taking up only one and a half bins rather than the three it had used before.

Added to the fact that most distributors at this point weren't taking the singles back anymore, as they knew they weren't going to make any more money on them. They were cheap enough for the record stores to take a loss at about a dollar or two a single. We sold them at cost in our cut-out bin, if anybody even wanted them at that point.

Even then I noticed that this had been a deliberate move to eradicate the format. It was the time that computers now had the cd-rom drive where cds could be ripped onto the computer and multiple copies made. And at this point, people were still dubbing onto tape as well, myself included. Why spend money on the ever-rising price of cds when one could copy and return? Everybody's been doing it since the beginning, why stop now?

And of course, this was also about the time that the internet was really coming into the forefront, and some bright kids realized that these copiable cd tracks could be posted online...and thus was born the so-called illegal file-sharing controversy.

At this point, singles were now dead in the water.

.....

Fast-forward to the mid-00's.

At this point, a lot of record store chains have vanished. Tower Records had started its slow descent after years of industry leading. HMV is long-gone from the US market. A lot of smaller chains have been bought out or simply left. Indie chains, such as Newbury Comics up in New England, have miraculously stayed the course by changing with the times and knowing exactly what the public needs and wants, both musically and store-wise.

And online, iTunes has become the industry leader, followed closely by the now-legal Napster and other online music suppliers. Even Amazon and Buy.com sells mp3s now.

And what is happening to the albums? Well, one can't really avoid the stories that have been going around the past few years of music industry finances dropping dangerously. Many are still convinced that illegal file-sharing has a lot to do with this, and to some extent I think they're right, but for the most part I think the industry is finally coming to terms that a lot more music is being sold online than in the store. Let's face it--it's a lot easier to find an obscure track online than it is to go to the nearest record store in a futile attempt to find it, and chances are that not all record stores do special orders anymore, as it doesn't help their bottom line one bit.

This is where that Yahoo article gets interesting...they claim that they've come to terms with mp3 downloads as part of the industry, but they're still not sure exactly why hardly anyone buys albums anymore.

I can give two reasons, and these reasons have been around for longer than this whole situation:

1) The music buying public is and always has been choosy as to what it wants to spend its money on (or its variant, that they're too broke to buy everything and have to choose a limited number).

2) The music industry can't sell an album on a single track alone.

The first reason is well-known and well-covered, so I'll skip that one. The second one goes all the way back to the one-hit-wonder days where they'd fashion a full album around the one hit. It's not as bad as it used to be, with one great song and nine filler pieces of crap that are basically carbon copies of the one hit. For the most part, most albums nowadays have decent songs to balance it all out. But we also have albums where the songwriting isn't nearly as good and the one hit single overshadows the rest of the tracks. And in today's world of cds that cost nearly twenty dollars, no one really wants to take that chance at the music store. Not when they can go online and sample a thirty-second snippet of the song at Amazon, or listen to it on Yahoo's Launchcast in full, and then buy it for $9.99 online--without the space-eating cd and jewel case.

Thing is, the music industry hasn't quite gotten it--yet. First off, they haven't quite figured out that, at least in America, the bulk of the music-buying public is going to buy the songs they like, but not necessarily the whole album. It's not that they're obsessed with wanting to buy the whole album, it's that they really like the song they've heard on the radio or online and want to hear that song as frequently as possible.

Back in the 80s during the time of vinyl and cassette, these would be the people who would have a small collection of store-bought albums and/or tapes, probably enough to fit into a milk crate, and even then they weren't the collector kind--these would be the people whose copies of the album would be well-worn, lacking the tape insert (and sometimes even the Norelco case--yes, that's the official term for the plastic cover) or the album cover. They weren't the collector crowd that kept the covers in pristine condition. They were the ones who forgot the tape underneath the car seat for three months. And they were also the ones who taped stuff off the radio and considered it part of the collection rather than a compilation.

Even now, the people who are going to buy the whole album are either the diehard fans, the recently-impressed newcomers, or the collectors, and not the occasional music fan, although there are exceptions. But for the most part, they're the ones who used to enjoy listening to Top 40 radio and now listen to someone's webcast or to XM or Sirius. They're the ones who are going to say "hey, that's a cool song, where's the link to download it?" They're the ones who are going to say it's not worth the bother if it's not readily--or legally--available online. And they're also the ones who are supposedly being targeted by the music industry as a guage into what's popular. And by popular, we mean "everyone's buying it" but not necessarily "everyone likes it." There's a gap between what's selling and what's good, and I think for the most part everyone knows that, but not everyone cares. That's not the problem, though. The problem is that the music industry is, and for the most part always has been, obsessed with the numbers. And in this day and age the numbers aren't exactly telling them what they need to know.

What the industry should know is that the music-buying public has always been a song-oriented crowd, not an album-oriented crowd. It has nothing to do with lack of attention span; it has everything to do with the fact that radio has trained us to focus song-to-song, not in one complete album listen; that is something we learned on our own when we bought the albums or heard them on the rare station that played album sides. Phasing out the singles industry in the 90s may have looked good on paper and for the bottom line, but in all honesty it was akin to shooting themselves in the foot. And in the bustle of achieving the bottom line with industry shake-ups as well as keeping up with changing tastes, they seem to have forgotten all of this.

.....

Do I think that they should bring back the single format? In all honesty, I think it's far too late for that in this day and age. The internet has taken care of that already. However, if they brought back an internet-ready single format...say, akin to the old-school kind with rare tracks and/or interesting extended remixes of the hit song, and perhaps released it as a low-price package (the online releases of older maxi-singles like this go from $3.99 to $6.99, which in reality isn't too bad), then maybe it might not be a bad idea. It may not sell as much as people want, but then again, it will appease a lot of the more obsessive fans like myself.