From where I sit, it looks like electronic delivery of singles has killed the album dead, even more effectively than MTV.

True, though this was in progress long, long before the iTMS came around. The music industry spent decades shaping radio into a medium that pushed singles, operating under the assumption that there would never be a way for a customer to pay a fair price for just the desired track. They’d have to buy the whole CD for $18, or pay slightly less for an EP or other similar packaging of “single plus crap.”

When Napster hit and people started being able to get just the one track, well, it was like putting a bare wire in parallel with a big fat resistor. I’m sure that the substantial price differential ($0 vs $8 or whatever for the CD single) didn’t hurt, but I bet we’d have seen a similar effect if Napster had been charging, oh, I dunno, $0.99 per track.

And here we are at the iTMS.

[Note that this discussion dovetails nicely with the NBC/Universal fiasco; given a good thing (episodes of "The Office" at $2 apiece) NBC decided they wanted to get into the "plus crap" marketing game (viz., bundling), and took their toys and left. Those that do not learn from the past...]

I can pay $1.00 for one song via the iTunes Music Store, or I can pay $6.00 for that one song plus a couple of bad remixes or a mediocre B-side on a CD single. Why do music publishers not understand how one-sided this decision is? And I say this as someone who owns more than one CD single!

One of these articles referred to “the mostly defunct single format.” They really needed to be more specific: it’s the CD single format that is moribund. Singles are once again taking over as the primary delivery format of music — it’s just that they’re being delivered electronically rather than on round bits of plastic.

It still seems to me that iTMS pricing is stacked towards encouraging singles purchases, not albums. For example, Linkin Park’s breakout album is $12, the sum of the individual 99-cent track prices. With the album you get two extra tracks that are not purchasable individually, plus a live take of one regular album track. Is that enough of an incentive to steer people to the full album? Apparently not: the popularity graph shows that most people have bought just the one big single release from the album, and almost nobody has bought more than the four official singles from it. $4, not $12.

From where I sit, it looks like electronic delivery of singles has killed the album dead, even more effectively than MTV. If the publishers really want people to buy albums, they need to provide actual incentive, y’know?