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Originally Posted by hipster_bebop_junkie
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This is actually pretty funny, and it's the truth:
The Vinyl Solution
#19 The industry kills the single—and begins its own slow demise
In the early ’80s, the music industry began to phase out vinyl singles in favor of cassettes and later, CDs. Then, since it costs the same to manufacture a CD single as a full album, they ditched the format almost altogether. But they forgot that singles were how fans got into the music-buying habit before they had enough money to spend on albums. The end result? Kids who expect music for free. “Greed to force consumers to buy an album [resulted] in the loss of an entire generation of record consumers,” says Billboard charts expert Joel Whitburn. “People who could only afford to buy their favorite hit of the week were told it wasn’t available as a single. Instead, they stopped going to record shops and turned their attention to illegally downloading songs.”
Unintended consequence The Eagles still top the album charts.
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Yeah, this and the #1 of the record labels killing Napster instead of making use of it (they tried the same thing with radio way back when, they just couldn't succeed in killing it and had to learn how to use it) are spot on.
That said, I'd rank them as #2 and #3 respectively behind the #1 of investing 90% of their promotional money and energy in the early '00s in less than ten artists. When all the people who actually spend money on music (and I'm not talking about the sort of underground fanatics you find here, but the average consumer of media goods, the people who heard of Nirvana on MTV and went and bought it) heard about was Britney and her five clones, they just invested their funds in other entertainment. Combine that with the industry smashing Napster into a thousand differnt file sharing sources and, how amazing, recorded music sales plummeted.