Music industry aims to kill its single hatred: the single
By David Bauder
Associated Press
The first time you entered a music store, chances are it was because there was one song you had to have.
Maybe it was "I Want to Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles, or Marvin Gaye's "I Heard it Through the Grapevine." Perhaps you obsessed over "Night Fever" by the Bee Gees, "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran or 'N Sync's "Bye Bye Bye."
Nickelback's CD single for the song "How You Remind Me" hasn't cut into sales of its "Silver Side Up" top 10 album.
These days, finding that song — without buying many more you don't want — is becoming increasingly difficult.
The music industry is killing off the single.
Once the backbone of the business, singles sales totaled 31 million last year, down a whopping 41 percent from 2000, according to Soundscan. It's believed to be the lowest sales figure since the late 1940s, when singles were introduced on vinyl.
Singles aren't even made for many popular songs because music companies think they're unprofitable.
Record retailers complain this alienates fans, particularly young ones, by forcing them to spend more than they want or — worse yet — retrieve songs online.
"I think they're losing a whole generation of record buyers," said Carl Rosenbaum, chief executive of Top Hits, a Buffalo Grove, Ill., company that supplies music to 15,000 stores nationwide.
"You either have to steal it off the Internet or you just don't buy it at all," he said. "The other option is to buy a full CD for $18. If you're just introducing yourself to an act, you don't want to do that. It's hard to figure out what their thinking is."
Music executives, in turn, blame retailers for discounting singles so heavily it's impossible to make money.
"We can't work it out," said Val Azzoli, co-chairman of the Atlantic Group of record labels. "We're not an industry that works together."
If the single dies, the beginning of the end can be traced back a decade to the start of Soundscan, which provided the first precise measurements of music sales.
Executives who long suspected that singles cut into sales of the more profitable full-length CDs had evidence to back that up, said Jordan Katz, senior vice president of sales at Arista Records.
There's some debate about the extent to which that's true, though.
Bob Higgins, chief executive of the Albany, N.Y.-based Trans World Entertainment, which owns 950 music stores, said he believes singles hurt album sales in only about 15 percent of the cases.
Nickelback's "Silver Side Up" album is in the top 10, seemingly unhurt by the CD single for the song "How You Remind Me." And Santana sold boatloads of its most recent album despite a succession of singles, he said.
The Nickelback single can be found in Tower Records, but not at Cheapo Music at University. None of the other CD singles in the Billboard Top 10 last week were available at the Honolulu stores.
CD singles, which usually have two or three songs, generally retail for between $3 and $5 in Hawai'i. Many retailers routinely discount them by 50 percent or more, Azzoli said.
In the late 1990s, there was a brief period when record companies put singles by singers like Mariah Carey on sale for a money-losing 49 cents, artificially boosting sales to secure flashy chart debuts.
To avoid manipulations of its charts, Billboard changed the way it computed the Top 40 to reflect radio airplay as well as sales.
Thereafter, it was possible to have a hit "single" without a song ever being released as a single.
The demise of the single means more of music's romance is disappearing, just like when colorful album covers were replaced by tiny CD booklets.
