Right To Reply #3: Part Two

The subject: The future of recorded music

The participants:
Ben - your host
Nick - Contributing Editor for Stylus and author of Auspicious Fish
Simon - the one and only Mr No Rock & Roll Fun
Leon - Portsmouth's very own musical renegade
Kenny - the man behind the hand and the brains behind ace popcult blog Parallax View
Jez - Stereolab afficionado instrumental in introducing me to the delights of The Smiths and The Wedding Present
He Who Cannot Be Named - the shadowy figure behind Excuse Me For Laughing

If singles are designed to sell albums, and the album format could potentially die out, where does that leave singles?

Leon: I think this means the single format as we know it will be phased out. Thank fuck! Occasionally you still get the odd single with a couple of quality B-sides but this is by no means the norm. Lame remixes, live tracks and album tracks are all too frequent. I think the fact that singles are used to promote albums is the cause of the problem. Bands used to regularly release singles and EPs that had no relation to an album. Now we get 4 or 5 singles from an album which means between 4 and 10 B-side slots to fill.

Nick: Singles aren’t just adverts for albums. On a financial, turn-a-profit, use them as a loss-leader basis, yes maybe they are, but in the hearts and minds of people who buy singles and listen to radio they’re much, much more than that.

Kenny: Singles may well be 'designed' to sell albums but the reason people buy them is because they like the tune and want to have easy and ready access to play the thing as often as they can. Either that, or they want to fuck the life out of the singer. And, in total pop harmony, sometimes both. As long as there are still good tunes and fuckable singers and the price remains within the purchase range of pubescents, the single will still live on.

Ben: That’s precisely the problem, though. CD singles are ludicrously expensive, and on the rare occasions I buy them I either go to Selectadisc where they’re permanently cheap or else pick them up from HMV in the first week of release when they’re £1.99 because I resent shelling out four quid for three tracks.

He Who Cannot Be Named: I haven't bought a single since 2002. They're way too expensive, at least the last time I remember. I don't think singles are specifically designed to sell albums – that's a record company design, but I would download them should I still be doing so. I sometimes think singles are pointless because the album will come sooner or later.

Nick: Had it not been released as a single ‘Toxic’ would just be a good album track on a record that bombed and Britney would be heading for farm work and half a dozen fat babies. The significance of a number one single is still massive. Net-heads may doubt it, but you ask hardcore Streets fans or Mike Skinner himself – it matters.

Ben: The number one slot might still be much coveted and retain much of its cultural significance, but it now means very little in terms of sales, and hard cash is the only language the major labels understand. On a slow week you can top the charts with a piffling 30,000 sales.

Jez: It can’t continue as it is. It will go one of two ways: death or glory. The trouble is who buys them now and what do you have to do to get a different market to start buying them?

Nick: I don’t think there’s any danger of singles vanishing – albums won’t vanish, and demand for radio stations in the DAB / broadband age is only going to increase. Net-addicted musos who burn CDRs with 700megs of downloaded, themed MP3s to listen to at work and who never turn the radio on are a tiny minority.

Leon: I think the traditional Top 40 will continue, but be based on download sales. Here’s hoping the ‘preview’ times for singles will decrease too. Currently, singles seem to be played on the radio etc 6 to 8 weeks before release. This is far too long. Who’s going to be interested by the time it comes out?

Nick: The advent of downloading would seem to privilege singles (or, rather, individual songs) over albums, simply due to the fact that (a) they’re faster to download and (b) you’re no longer under any obligation to purchase a full album in order to acquire one song anymore. But this is more problematic than it seems. Firstly there’s the bugbear of sound quality, especially when it comes to legal download sites, which seem to run at such low bitrates that you may as well record stuff off the radio to dodgy old cassette tape. P2P networks make this better, as long as you can find someone with what you want ripped at an acceptable bitrate, which isn’t always possible. Dodgy sound is one of the reasons why my iPod has lain unused for the last fortnight, while the clunkier, clumsier, lower-capacity Minidisc has been sought out.

Ben: To someone with no experience of downloading, it seems curious that sound quality should be so variable that it’s hardly an improvement on technology that’s now decades old.

Nick: Secondly there’s the vague distaste of the furtherance of the me-me-me now-now-now philosophy which immediately downloading single songs engenders – no delay of gratification, no prolonged engagement with a set of songs you may not necessarily already like (or even know) means that no longer are people going to be susceptible to songs that one might deem “growers” – what’s the point when you can download something instantly satisfying in a different way? As if we weren’t ADHD enough as a culture already.

Ben: True enough, but then singles are – generally speaking – chosen for their immediacy and accessibility. That’s not to say, of course, that a song released in single format can’t be a grower, though.

Nick: And thirdly, this view of singles encourages the idea that they are somehow more natural, more right, than albums, that the 2-5 minute long pop song is somehow the platonic essence of pop music when really the length of songs is as arbitrary as the length of albums (albums comprising as much music as you can fit on a black plastic disc which rotates at 33rpm, singles lasting as long as a single crank of a gramophone). (Obviously both these examples are overly simplified, but there’s a germ of sense, and a host of other reasons [single sensory concentration spans, radio advertisers demands etcetera] which add further foundation to the reasons for the lengths of recorded music but obviously there’s the live tradition of folk music which throws a spanner in the works – folk songs in my experience either last thirty seconds or else ALL FUCKING DAY).

He Who Cannot Be Named: It seems I have but regressed back to the cave from whence my music habits have formed. I see it slowly changing though. Future generations will be more techno-literate and old traditions will be forgotten.

Update: Simon chews over Colin Murray's views of downloading and its impact on the sale of singles.