Anyone paying even cursory attention to the news over the last couple of years is probably well familiar with the totally fucked state the modern music industry has found itself in over the last four years. Yeah, downloading and piracy are pretty major bugaboos these days, but the damage is being done on nearly all levels: not just with the weak sales of recent albums. The many iterations of the industry's current woes have been covered exhaustively: music itself sucks, radio stations care more about enedlessly spinning the overexposed hits of 1964-1999 than actually trying anything new (which has turned car commercials and The O.C. into the current way to break new acts), kids care more about video games than music, concert attendance is dive-bombing while ticket prices are skyrocketing, the major labels are collapsing in on themselves while eating each other up, record stores themselves are an anachronism, et cetera.
What I find rather darkly amusing about the above is that you hardly ever see discussed what in my mind are the three root causes for most of this malaise
1. The advent of the Nielsen Soundscan era, which was the beginning of the industry's current idiotic obsession with first-week numbers ... all other priorities rescinded.
2. The major label-funded creation of the three headed monster that is Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target. After a decade of setting the table, with thousands of independent record stores and dozens of national record store chains long since closed, these three mass-merchants (all of whom would just as soon sell singing fish plaques as Mariah Carey CDs) have become, by some distance, the three biggest retail accounts in music. Even better, none of these chains cater to anything outside of the current Top 40. Worst of all, and the biggest reason for the annihilation of the music retail base, the dominance of the mass merchants was almost entirely due to an incredibly short-sighted effort by the major labels to generate bigger SoundScan numbers by using the loss-leader pricing ability of these chains to crank up first-week numbers as big as possible. Funnily enough, the dependence of the major labels on the mass merchants has become such that they can ill afford to let these accounts stop carrying their product and, in effect, pay these stores for shelf space.
3. The forced killing of the singles market. This catastrophic strategic miscalculation, more than any other factor, is directly responsible for the explosion of P2P downloading at the tail end of the decade, which eventually sent the entire industry into a tailspin.
It's not often that I get to pat myself on the back for clairvoyance, but I recently came across a feature article I'd written in the fall of 1997 (during my tenure as senior writer at Scene) that, nearly a decade later, literally screams a frustrated "I told you so!!" to the very industry I've been working in for half of my life. Some of the names in this article may have changed, but the general thrust of the piece holds up pretty well ...
"Where'd Ya Hide The Singles?"
How New Sales Strategies Are Rendering Hit Singles Obsolete
Following a silent, subtle decline over the past seven years, the commercially released single -- once a dependable market-testing workhorse and the ideal way to break a new artist into public awareness -- appears to be an endangered species. This ominous trend has been most noticeable in the alternative rock genre, but there have also been hundreds of popular songs in the categories of rap, country, adult contemporary and dance music deliberately kept off store shelves as well. Anyone searching for the current hits by the Rolling Stones, Matchbox 20, Oasis, Smash Mouth, or the Wallflowers on cassette or CD single? Save yourself some grief -- they don't exist.
Throughout the rock era, singles were considered to be the "gateway" format for the industry to establish regular music buying patterns for the under-18 demographic, who can rarely afford buy full length releases due to limited average income. Once teenagers had acquired a habit of buying singles, the old thinking went, it was logical that they would "graduate" to buying full-length albums after they had acquired a steady source of income. With that process now short-circuited by the shrinking amount of radio hits available at a cheap price, kids (as well as adults) have become far more wary of splurging fifteen bucks on an unknown album when all they wanted was "that one song" in the first place.
While the single racks at record stores may appear to be full of smash hits, a little detective work reveals that this isn't necessarily so. Incredibly, less than 40% of the current Top 75 tracks being played on the radio have any kind of single available in stores. "Don't Speak," "Men In Black," "How Bizarre" and "Lovefool" (three of the biggest mass appeal radio smashes of the last year) have never even been released. The above percentage plummets to less than 15% when you examine the current Modern Rock Top 40 -- thus, if you're intending to pick up recent hits by Sublime, Foo Fighters, Sugar Ray or the Dave Matthews Band, you'll want to keep a twenty-spot handy for each.
Not surprisingly, record companies have vigorously defended this policy of abstinence, though their reasoning involves the kind of fallacious arguments and fudged-with facts one would expect from a political candidate on the campaign trail. The myriad reasons behind the lack of support for singles vary from bottom-line financial concerns to the preservation of "street-credibility" to the rise of new and upgraded technologies (i.e. video games and computer software) that are supposedly draining away the music buyers market here in the U.S.
The Legacy Of Vanilla Ice & MC Hammer
Perhaps the most oft-cited excuse for the dearth of hit radio songs appearing as singles is that a commercially available cassette or CD single cannibalizes its parent album's sales potential. In fairness to the labels, this argument is admittedly not without merit. The two ground-breaking (and most spectacular) examples of this strategy date back to the two biggest selling albums of 1990 -- MC Hammer's Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em and Vanilla Ice's To The Extreme (obviously, 1990 was a year we would all love to forget). Shifting a combined 17 million copies, the chief sales catalysts from these records were either never made available ("U Can't Touch This") or deleted just as popular demand began to spike ("Ice Ice Baby"). This grand experiment paid out huge dividends to the companies who went with the risky strategy -- and with the advent of SoundScan just around the corner in 1991, it was only a matter of time before both of these practices would become commonplace.
Seven years later, the major labels know how to make the once-reviled SoundScan (the independent firm that tabulates the sales figures used in the Billboard charts) system work in their favor. The refurbished-model Billboard album chart moves at a far more rapid pace these days, and perfect timing is of the essence if a label wants to grab that lofty debut at the Number One slot. Of course, it's doubly helpful to withhold the release of a hot advance single and instead force consumers to cough up for the full-length album as quickly as possible. Barbra Streisand's Higher Ground debuted at the top of the Billboard chart last week, moving over 200,000 units in the process. Granted, Streisand's fan base is considerable, yet how many copies were sold thanks to the non-availability of "Tell Him," her duet with Celine Dion (whose own new album featuring the same hit, Let's Talk About Love, debuts on this week's chart)?
This strategy can also work wonders when a single is flash-released for a week or so and then deleted as soon as the album hits the shelves a la "Ice Ice Baby." Hold your noses and check out the sales of Aqua's debut album Aquarium-- the single "Barbie Girl" was available for one week prior to the album's release and then deleted immediately. As a result, Aquarium moved nearly 750,000 units in its first two months of release. The two-week availability of Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping" (the "Rock And Roll Part 2" of the 1990's) has already surpassed Aqua's sales feat in its first two months on the shelves, and will likely be one of this Christmas season's surprise mega-sellers.
Never releasing a single in the first place can also work a potent magic on sales. Matchbox 20's Yourself Or Someone Like You has sold over 1.5 million copies on the strength of "Push," and Fleetwood Mac's blockbuster The Dance was driven in part by the massive radio and video blitz on "Silver Springs," which was serviced to the public only as a vinyl 45 record -- thus making it eligible to chart despite the fact that virtually no one outside of DJ's or hard-core collectors even buys vinyl anymore. With success stories like these, it does become easy to see the industry's point.
Despite these winning examples, there remains a substantial fault in this corporate boardroom logic -- how does one explain such monster albums as Hysteria, Rumours, Thriller, Metallica, Cracked Rear View, Pieces Of You, and Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness? All of these albums have had multiple singles released and yet still sold far into the multi-millions. The Hootie, Jewel and Smashing Pumpkins albums in particular are notable in that they were released well into this anti-single decade and all have flagrantly defied the notion that singles aren't a viable option in the late 1990's. More recently, LeAnn Rimes' You Light Up My Life blitzed through over one million copies in a month with not one, but two singles currently available and selling. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
In an interesting development, a small company called Under The Cover Records has indulged in pure capitalism and released its own cassette singles of "Fly" and "Walkin' On The Sun" by a couple of "studio acts" respectively dubbed Sweet Rain and Smack. These note-for-note renditions of the radio hits by Sugar Ray and Smash Mouth could be the beginning of something unheard of in the U.S. industry for decades -- the mass-marketing of big hits by faceless musicians for the purposes of commercial exploitation. Even better -- Sweet Rain and Smack would fit almost exactly where Sugar Ray and Smash Mouth would be located in singles displays. Cute. One can infer that "Barbie Girl" by Arrgh! is only weeks away at this point.
Our Prices Are In-sane!!
The other major factor working against singles comes from an entirely different (and ancient) industry strategy gone haywire. While it is possible to debate the wisdom and merits of the "lost album sales" theory, this other problem is a little more difficult to decry, even though it was brought on by the record companies themselves and its widespread use defied (and still defies) financial logic.
Incredibly, hit singles can now actually hurt a company's bottom line. This is thanks in part to the ludicrously high cost of record promotion (a lengthy, separate story in itself) and more directly due to the rampant deep-discounting and the free giveaways of thousands of singles to larger retail chains. It is this practice alone that has done far more damage to the format than any other in that it destroys not only whatever profits the single may have incurred at full price, but also lowers the perceived value of singles in the eyes of paying consumers. As with earlier, it's all a matter of chart manipulation -- this time aimed at the increasingly snail-paced singles chart.
As with albums, explosive first week sales are highly desired for superstar singles. -- partially to maintain a label's chart dominance in the marketplace and often to placate a the same label's expensive superstar acts, some of who have been wondering why they haven't been able to crack the Top 10 anymore in this brave new even-keeled SoundScan world.
In the old days, Billboard's sales charts were tabulated by phone and based on extremely fallible ranked reports from record stores, one-stops (the middlemen who supply the stores in most cases) and rack jobbers (the guys who supply some chains and big department stores). It was frighteningly easy in those days to deliberately enhance a record's standing with good old fashioned bribes and perks, or even threats. When the first SoundScan-determined Billboard chart hit the streets in late May of 1991, most of the old tricks of the trade vanished forever (despite a few devilishly clever attempts to subvert the data in the years since).
Now that fiddling around with sales data is virtually impossible, one must connive other methods with which to enhance an artist / label's standing in the marketplace. The deep-discounting frenzy that gripped the industry over the last three years was pretty much born of this thinking. The logic, again, is simple -- release the new single by, say, Mariah Carey at a price of 99 or even 49 cents, and a debut at (or near) the top of the charts is virtually guaranteed.
While some labels will offer singles to stores at greatly discounted prices to enhance profits, a few others will literally give away thousands of singles (complete with variable pricing stickers) to larger chains as a "goodwill" gesture. Since these singles are sent gratis, the store is guaranteed 100% pure profit on the title whenever it sells. Once, this strategy was used exclusively to break new artists into the mainstream by stimulating impulse sales. This is no longer the case, as many new superstar singles have been slashed to garage sale prices as well. With so many singles priced low, consumers rightly wonder why so many singles by big artists are cheaper than a buck while so many other singles remain at a list price of $3.49 or higher and in a nutshell you have devaluing of the format.
This practice hasn't always worked, however. A bomb is still a bomb, no matter how cheap the price. "To Make You Feel My Love," the premiere single from Billy Joel's Greatest Hits Volume 3 album (and his first single of any kind since early 1994) was recently issued at a pittance to virtually zero retail reaction. That's no sweat off of retailers' backs, though -- the unsold thousands of singles could then be returned for full credit to the record companies. Thus, the cost of a "free" hit single is actually quite high indeed -- the company takes a loss for the sake of chart appearances, and the problem is compounded.
While this sales practice is supposedly falling into decline (PolyGram has reportedly backed away from this practice, and the other majors are expected to fall in line -- at least as superstars are concerned), there are still an awful lot of shockingly good deals standing out on the shelves in a seeming mockery of the full-priced titles around them.
Anarchy In The U.K.
While singles are languishing in the U.S. market, they are flourishing overseas. However, this has created problems as well, especially in England, where an opposite problem exists with the format. The Brits run their railroad quite a bit differently from ours -- while the American heartland is bare of hits, the English moors are running wild with them.
As in America, the British have been resorting to the massive discounting of singles in the interest of enhanced chart stature (the U.K. charts are solely sales driven, which serves to raise the stakes even higher). The availability problem in England is the exact opposite of the American dilemma -- just about everything is made available as a single, and to stimulate sales even further, these singles are usually packaged as two-part EP's brimming over with b-sides and other unreleased treats.
The immediate result of this cornucopia of new product every single week in such a small market is that the U.K. Top 75 singles chart is now so jammed full of new songs that next to nothing sells for more than a few weeks at a time (or less) before being replaced by the next hit. On a recent list, only four tracks out of the Top 75 had made it into a third month of popularity -- it's like the Billboard Top 40 moving at Warp 9. But at least the selection is there, however ungodly bountiful by our industry's standards. The kind of choices the average British singles consumer is faced with have not been seen on these shores in years. With the industry in the U.K. up in arms and looking enviously at the heroically-long runs now common to the American charts, a change may be on the way, and probably not for the better as far as consumers are concerned.
To Be Continued...?
No matter what the reasoning, the partial elimination of the single is a potentially catastrophic solution to problems that admittedly shouldn't exist in the first place. Despite the continuing pressure on the format and the industry to carry on into the next century and introduce new generations to music and music buying, the single cannot succeed when such well-intentioned sabotage continues to run roughshod over its future potential. Consumers and retailers alike are demanding more singles choices, especially with the average price for a new superstar CD now at $17.98.
Inevitably, the single must continue to exist -- without it, the music business may very well continue its current low-growth rate and may even plunge into a new recession that not even a new Michael Jackson album could save ... unless it had a hit single, of course.
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