Adios, albums. Hello (again) to singles

Forget albums. The big win for a hot new artist is apparently a two-song, ringtone contract.

That's according to an article in The New York Times, which points to a growing trend of music buyers focusing on hit singles, instead of albums. Digital singles outsold plastic CDs for the first time last year, and buyers of digital music purchase singles over albums by a margin of 19-to-1.

Labels are trying to find new ways to prod consumers into buying albums, but some industry experts told the paper that the new trend may be for labels to morph from companies that put out albums to producers of "digital fan clubs" that help distribute individual songs.

Releasing music as singles is hardly new to the music industry; however, many bloggers appear to have never heard of the Brill Building and think that pop music originated in roughly 1996.

The article was met with glee by many bloggers, who were anxious for the day when music would come in single-serving size.

Blog community response:

"Power to the music-buying people I say, because it means producers can't get away with filling up CD space with sub-standard tunes. They just won't sell now unless the whole album really is worth buying and listening to."
--OrganGrinder

"A longstanding prediction repeated here: artists will stop putting out albums of 10--12 songs every few years and simply release songs when the songs are done. This will benefit both the fans and the artists. Fans won't have to wait years between hearing from the bands. And the bands won??t fall into that 'Where have they been for three years?' trap."
--Los Remote

"The advent of iTunes and other means on the internet have allowed consumers of music to do what they couldn't do before without having to buy an entire album: see if the entire album is worth buying. While it is true that the radio and television highlight an album's single(s), sometimes there are other tracks that do not get highlighted and led people in the past to buy an entire album out of curiosity (at least that is what I used to do). Now with iTunes and the internet, for example, users can sample several seconds of songs on an entire album or read what other consumers think about an album in the review section on Amazon.com. This all goes without mentioning all of the "illegal" downloading of songs and albums."
--R. Enochs