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- Is the music industry killing the single?
- Can The Album Survive Digital Music?
Is the music industry killing the single?
Record companies say there’s no profit
By David Bauder
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.msnbc.com/news/715839.asp
NEW YORK, March 1 — 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.”
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ONLINE POLL
If you want just one song by a particular artist, what do you do?
* 5106 responses
Buy the whole album and hope to like it
16%
Buy the single -- if one is available
10%
Download it free online
70%
Tape it off the radio
4%
Survey results tallied every 60 seconds. Live Votes reflect respondents' views and are not scientifically valid surveys.
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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 of the most popular songs because music companies think they’re so unprofitable.
Among Billboard magazine’s 40 most popular songs the week of Feb. 23, only five were available as singles on compact disc. Eighteen were on sale just as vinyl records.
Seventeen songs, including Creed’s “My Sacrifice,” No Doubt’s “Hey Baby,” Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero” and Alanis Morissette’s “Hands Clean,” were only available if you bought a full album.
Record retailers complain this alienates fans, particularly young ones, by forcing them to spend more than they want or — worse yet — retrieve songs online.
LOST GENERATION
‘We can’t work it out. We’re not an industry that works together.’
— VAL AZZOLI
co-chairman of the Atlantic Group of record labels “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 altogether, the beginning of the end can be traced a decade back 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 now had evidence to back that up, said Jordan Katz, senior vice president of sales at Arista Records.
DEBATE CONTINUES
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.
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Nickelback’s “Silver Side Up” album is currently 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.
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. Therefore, it was possible to have a hit “single” without a song ever being released as a single.
CD singles, which usually have two or three songs, generally retail for between $3 and $4. Many retailers routinely discount them by 50 percent or more, Azzoli said. And there are still music companies that encourage this by secretly giving singles away to retailers to inflate sales, he said.
“If I could get $5 a single and sell a million of them, hey, there’s a business there,” Azzoli said.
ROMANCE DISAPPEARING
‘‘Nine-year-old puts his money down. Every scratch, every click, every heartbeat. Every breath that I held for you.’
— ELVIS COSTELLO
new song about collecting singles 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. In a song being released this spring, Elvis Costello waxes nostalgic about collecting stacks of 45s (a phrase already consigned to history, since it refers to the number of revolutions a 7-inch disc made each minute on a turntable).
“Nine-year-old puts his money down,” he sings. “Every scratch, every click, every heartbeat. Every breath that I held for you.”
Music companies recognize the danger, but “their short-term motivation is to get as much profit as possible,” said Ed Christman, retail editor at Billboard. “The fact that young kids aren’t buying records is a long-term worry.”
It’s not easy to find the section where singles are sold at the Virgin megastore in New York’s Times Square.
Walk past the display of top albums, go down the escalator and wander to the dance section in a back corner.
It’s close to where Jeannie Imperati of North Haven, Conn., was grumbling one recent day when she took her 15-year-old son shopping.
“I’ll spend $100 on CDs just so he can get one song out of each of them,” she said.
Her friend, John Cas, said he found the lack of choices in the singles section frustrating.
“Most of the CDs have only one good song out of a dozen,” he said. “At 18 or 20 bucks a pop, you want to be able to enjoy the whole CD.”
MAXI-SINGLES
‘We have to get kids in the habit of buying music. I’m trying to figure out innovative ways to have singles and albums co-exist.’
— JORDAN KATZ
Arista Records The space that music stores used to devote to singles is dwindling, or disappearing altogether. One worry for Rosenbaum’s Top Hits is that the chains he supplies with music, like Eckerd Drugs, may simply use the space for non-music products.
Now he’s distributing golf balls as well as music.
At Arista, Katz is sensitive to concerns on both sides and is among executives experimenting with ways to make more singles available, though maybe not in the way many consumers would want.
In some cases, singles are made available before an album’s release but pulled from stores when the album comes out. Arista also makes singles for songs after they have cooled off as a hit. Pink’s “Get the Party Started,” currently in Billboard’s Top 10, isn’t a CD single now but may be in a couple of months.
Labels are also experimenting more with so-called maxi-singles. They may contain five or six songs — often different remixes of the same song — and are sold for between $7 and $8. The cost of manufacturing them are similar to regular singles, so profits are higher.
Some artists also release DVD singles with a video included with the music.
“We have to get kids in the habit of buying music,” Katz said. “I’m trying to figure out innovative ways to have singles and albums co-exist.”
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Can The Album Survive Digital Music?
Ian Zack, 02.22.02, 12:00 PM ET
http://www.forbes.com/2002/02/22/0222albums.html
NEW YORK - Middle-aged music fans remember picking up the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album in 1967, pouring over its cryptic cover, pulling out the giveaway cutouts inside and being blown away by one of the most famous artistic creations in popular music history.
But don't tell that to Matt Goyer.
"As a music fan, I'd much prefer to download a new song every month or two months, rather than waiting two years for an album," says Goyer, a 22-year-old who has downloaded 3,000 songs from the Internet to his computer. "I pretty much don't buy CDs anymore."
The digital music revolution is barely beyond the Fort Sumter stage, but it's worth asking: Will there be albums, as they're known today, in the future?
Some say yes.
"There's a lot of evidence that shoppers and consumers like to go to a record store, to see and touch and feel the product," says Alan Malasky, a lawyer for the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, which represents music retailers. "I don't think that anyone is realistically saying that CDs or albums are going to disappear in the foreseeable future."
Don't be so sure, though. Listen to Dave Goldberg, vice president and general manager of music for Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people): "I think we all pretty much agree that we are going to move away from the physical delivery of music," he says. "It won't be delivered on a piece of plastic."
To those too young to know the difference between Mick Jagger and Mick Fleetwood, it may seem like albums have been around forever. But for more than half of the last century, single songs and not full-length albums ruled the music world. Fans bought their blues, country and popular music on 78 RPM records, later on 45 RPM records, one or two songs at a time. Columbia ushered in the LP long-playing record format in the late 1940s, but it did not immediately become dominant. Elvis Presley built his reputation in the 1950s on hit singles, not albums.
Credit Frank Sinatra for elevating the album to the status of an artistic statement in the mid-1950s. Later, in the '60s, bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan did the same in rock music. Single 45s eventually became mere marketing tools for albums and nothing more. Compact discs, introduced in 1982, dealt the first blow to the aesthetics of the album, relegating the cover art, lyrics and liner notes to the size of a jewel case.
Then came Napster, the free music download service, which took off in the late 1990s and had 30 million users trading digital music downloaded from the Internet before record companies forced its shutdown last year. Many users have since migrated to Morpheus and other free sites, while several pay-subscription download services have sprung up, including MusicNet, Pressplay and EMusic.
Some musicians have begun challenging the pay services as they did Napster, arguing that they never gave permission for their songs to be sold digitally, one at a time. Some look into the digital future and don't like what they see, economically or artistically.
Howard King, a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer whose clients include Metallica and Dr. Dre, says a lot of musicians are concerned that albums could be a thing of the past if record companies decide they can make more money offering songs piecemeal.
"It somehow cheapens it that one item gets put out and 14 tracks get missed," King says. "It's like someone taking a corner of a Chagall painting and saying that's the whole painting."
Andy Schuon, chief of Pressplay, the new music download service backed by Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people), EMI Group and Vivendi's (nyse: V - news - people) Universal Music Group, says there's always been two kinds of artists, those who make albums as artistic statements, the Bruce Springsteens and U2s of the world, and those who produce a collection of songs because it has been the conventional way of marketing music.
Schuon insists that albums will remain viable, although his choice of words is interesting: "The album is for the moment here to stay."
There was some good news for albums in 2001. U2 released one of its most successful albums ever, All That You Can't Leave Behind, which already has gone triple-platinum (3 million in sales). LP fans swarmed Restoration Hardware (nasdaq: RSTO - news - people) stores last Christmas to get a boxy retro turntable, proving there is still a market for albums, even on vinyl.
But overall the news was dismal for the record industry. Compact disc sales fell 3% last year, and are down 8% so far this year, according to SoundScan. The drop is attributed in part to digital downloading and CD burning. There were an estimated 150,000 subscribers to paid music-download services at the end of 2001, according to IDC, with the number expected to rise to 10 million by 2005. Untold others are still downloading for free, waiting to see how the legal issues over online music sharing play out.
"Until the record companies find a new business model, where they are again making money on singles, they are still going to push albums," says Owen Sloane, an entertainment lawyer with 30 years in the business. "This digital music and the emphasis on singles in a way brings us back full circle."
Under the current system, record companies must kiss a lot of frogs to find a few princes among up-and-coming artists. Companies can spend $1 million to $2 million promoting a new album by a mainstream artist, but only a few of them ever pay off. In 2001, some 30,000 records were released in the U.S. Only 146 of those went gold, meaning they sold 500,000 copies, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
Yahoo!'s Goldberg thinks albums as they're conceived today probably won't exist once digital music becomes mainstream, although he hesitates to say how long that will take.
In his view, some artists in the future, especially those who don't make their living playing sold-out stadiums, will want to release one or two songs at a time anyway. The ones who do a lot of shows, like a Dave Matthews Band, will probably continue to release a group of songs so they have something to promote around the world. Will these batches of songs look like albums?
"There will be some kind of visual imagery that goes with it," Goldberg predicts. "Will it still be artwork or animation or streaming video? I don't know. It may be sort of like the way they do special editions now, and the artwork and the lyrics could be purchased by the die-hard fans."
But first there has to be a model of disseminating the music acceptable to record companies, fans and the artists themselves. With the rise of Napster, artists saw the promise of democratizing the distribution of music. Now that the big labels have started to assert themselves, no one knows how artists of the future will be heard.
Jules, a 26-year-old singer from Florida, has gotten some radio and club play from her remake of the Pat Benatar hit "We Belong." She longs to make albums, but if the tide turns again to singles--this time of the digital variety--she would not complain.
"If that's the approach," she says, "I would just love to get out there and be heard."
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The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on
the unreasonable man. -George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate
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