[Dixielandjazz] Singles, pre-LP and post-CD

[Robert Ringwald]

How will the following affect OKOM (Our Kind Of Music)?
  
Singles, pre-LP and post-CD

Singles Might Save the Music Industry
by Eric Felten
Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2011

The music business has been wringing its hands over the dramatically decreasing ka-ching
of the cash register. There may not be agreement on the exact magnitude of the industry's
collapse -- cataclysm or mere catastrophe? -- but one main cause is clear: the humble
"single."
Until digital downloads came along, to get a copy of the one hit tune found on a
given album, you had to buy the whole CD, a technology that effectively killed off
the old 45 rpm vinyl single. But now, in the age of iTunes, the single is back from
the brink of extinction. Instead of making a purchase north of $15, consumers can
get the one song they want, unbundled, for a dollar, more or less. Revenues, not
surprisingly, are down.
Lady Gaga is likely to sell far more copies of the individual digital track "Born
This Way" than she will copies of the CD. And she's hardly the only artist embracing
the single, which is quickly becoming the main way people purchase music. And while
the switch may be an immediate disaster for the recording industry's bottom line,
it just might be the best thing to happen, musically, to a business grown stale and
stagnant.
For starters, we may finally escape the singles/album bifurcation that played into
the tyranny of teenybop pop for decades. Singles, being cheaper, were purchased disproportionately
by the adenoidal set. Because the Top 40 was based in large part on the sale of singles,
the gauge of popularity was skewed heavily toward adolescent tastes. But before the
LP came along in the late '40s, the record business was all about singles, and teens
didn't have a total monopoly on buying them. The pre-LP era was one of astonishing
musical creativity: The last time singles were the uncontested format for delivering
recorded music, Count Basie, Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman were popular
artists. We should be so lucky.
How many promising acts got the boot over the years because the big album didn't
sell enough to justify the bloated cost of producing 45 minutes of music? How much
better if bands could record and release a tune or two at a time, not only keeping
costs lean but gaining the flexibility to hone and revise their sound as listeners
give them immediate feedback. Singles once gave musicians the chance to rework and
refashion their best material. In the course of four years, Ellington released eight
different records of the signature song "East St. Louis Toodle-oo." Not only did
Duke get to experiment, but he was able to give his composition legs by reintroducing
it over and again, dressed each time in a new arrangement -- an early sort of remixing,
if you will.
I suspect that singles also had something to do with the culture of producing "standard"
tunes. If one band or singer had a hit with a song, other bands could head into the
studio, knock out their own versions and have them in jukeboxes and stores within
weeks. If the revitalized singles market helps generate a new generation of standards,
that alone would be cause for celebration.
At the same time, the new age of the single might even help musicians take more artistic
chances: The investment in time and money is so much less for a single that artists
may be able to take risks with individual tracks that they were not able to do with
the big make-or-break discs.
Singles allowed musicians to keep themselves more regularly before the public. Frank
Sinatra pioneered the "concept album," the idea of programming a long disc with thematically
unified songs, and did so brilliantly with such albums as "In the Wee Small Hours"
and "Come Dance With Me." But he also used a steady release of first-rate singles,
such as "Witchcraft," to give his audience something fresh to buy every few months.
It is a marketing strategy that artists have been relearning as the technology evolves.
Over the years, singles came to be viewed almost with derision. Concept albums did
much to establish the notion that the only worthy ambition of recording artists was
to produce long-format discs. Consider the judgment of George Martin, the Beatles'
producer, from his memoir, "All You Need Is Ears." He wrote that 1967's "Sgt. Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band" "was the album which turned the Beatles from being just
an ordinary rock-and-roll group into being significant contributors to the history
of artistic performance." It's a remarkable statement. The band that redefined modern
celebrity, the band that created the music on "Rubber Soul" and "Revolver," was just
"an ordinary rock-and-roll group" until "Sgt. Pepper"? But such is the outsize importance
attached to grand concept albums.
Alas, for every "Sgt. Pepper," there are thousands of discs with one or two tunes
for which the producers had hopes plus enough filler to bulk the project up to album
length. Now that music buyers are making their purchases piecemeal, there's no more
need for the padding. The only music worth recording will be the music worthy enough
that it has a chance to be bought for its own sake.
If that means less junk gets produced and released, the triumph of the single just
might be a rebirth, not the death, of the music industry.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
530/ 642-9551 Office
916/ 806-9551 Cell
Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV

My wife was hinting about what she wanted for our upcoming anniversary.
She said, "I want something shiny that goes from 0 to 150 in about 3 seconds."
I bought her a bathroom scale.