Something I said on ILM yesterday.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Which nobody addressed - the thread was moving fast and this was a tangent.

I can think of two long-term marketing triumphs for the record industry. The former possibly accidental (but probably not), the latter definitely on purpose. First is the promotion of the album as a format and the repackaging of popular music as non-disposable. Second (linked to the first) is the promotion and success of the CD format as a way to buy old music as well as new.

It's the level of accident I'm interested in really. The move to album format, the move away from disposability - when did these happen (I know that in the UK 1969 was the year album sales overtook single sales), and how proactive or reactive were the record labels in this?

Comments

[koganbot]

I'm not sure that singles = disposability, albums = longevity, at least not simply. The single was the only real format until the longplayer was introduced in about 1953 ("albums" before them were a physical set of individual singles on multiple pieces of vinyl packaged together like a photo album, hence the name "album"). So emphasizing the single after that for a while just means going on with business as usual. Are soundtrack albums meant to last or meant as souvenirs and remembrances? And easy listening being on LP makes sense not because you want to keep the album eternally but because you put on easy listening in order to chill out while it plays in the background. And kids buying singles aren't necessarily assuming they'll toss 'em in a few years, but rather are making a decision about what they can afford.

Which doesn't mean you're wrong to link the commercial triumph of album to a sense of supposed permanent value, but rather, this isn't necessarily built into the album from the get-go.

By the way, in the '80s and '90s in the U.S. the record companies had an odd attitued towards the single, trying to get some consumers to buy at first and then have everyone else jump to the album once the single was made unavailable. This didn't quite go for the 12-inch single, which was something of a different animal and was often on hip-hop and dance indies. But I remember in the late '80s reading an analysis that showed that if you combined regular and 12-inch single sales, single sales were actually rising for a time (though not nearly to the extent that album sales were). My impression - again I haven't done the research - is that the record companies really wished they could do away with the single altogether, but consumer demand remained.