Heist said:
New day in business...hot single does not = big album sales. Why buy the album and invest in a new artists when you got wanted for 99 cents.
All I said was that the single wasn't "lukewarm" It was a "hot" #1. I also said that it was heavily downloaded so there wouldn't likely be any great need to buy the album, at least not until after a few more hits had popped out.
Basically, the entire music business is going back to 1950 were singles ruled the day and there was no such thing as an album (and I know the guy who invented the format, Lee Abrams).
"Singles" actually ruled into the late '60s until the "concept album" took off. Albums before that were usually a collection of hits and bland filler, though there were still some classic ones from that time anyway.
"Cassette singles" came back a bit in the '80s and into early '90s (when record companies lowered the priced to $.99). But then cassettes disappeared. And then the CD single pretty much failed in the mid-'90s, which only left the CD album for folks to buy and that's why sales of CDs went through the roof in the late-'90s and peaked at an all-time high in 2000 and has gradually declined since (thanks to the internet).
It's a good thing though for us. For too long artists were making 4 great songs and then throwing in a bunch of bullshit for 6-8 tracks to meet their contract commitment. Kind of like writing a book with a few good chapters and the rest is crap.
That was more true, as I said earlier, before the late '60s. Since then artists have generally taken their albums more seriously, with certain exceptions for lighter or "singles" acts. If anything, with all the single downloading now, artists are MORE likely to just put out hits collections since less folks are taking CDs to heart. Singles tend to kill serious albums. The cycle will come back around again eventually. Always does.
Unfortunately, what also happened with CDs was that since there was so much available space on the disc certain artists felt the need to
fill it all up. Overlong CDs, even by great artists, tend to annoy consumers, even though they can program their player to just play what they like. There was never a need for a 75-minute
Janet Jackson album, with lame
spoken interludes, when a tight 50-minute one (which would actually be longish for an old LP or cassette) would've done the trick as well or better. She's just one example of an artist who went hogwild with disc space. Anyway, that kinda stuff has also contributed to the decline of CDs sales, along with, of course, the availabilty of downloadable singles and file sharing. Nonetheless, CDs still sell 10M units a week and aren't gonna disappear (lots of under-20s and over-40s still buy CDs).
There are always gonna be changes in how music is delivered, but the music itself will never stop.