Have Singles Killed Albums?

Video Transcript

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[00:00:00] Emily: Who buys records anymore. Dorks,

[00:00:07] welcome to get offset. My name is Emily, and I’m going to talk about something that I’ve definitely been thinking about a lot. And, uh, recently I was in the tone mob group and Blake Weiland Asda, our album’s dead or something like that. And, um, I think that’s a very interesting thing to talk about that people have been talking about for like 21 years.

[00:00:34] I don’t know when it has to come out like 1999. Yeah. So let’s have a bit of a history lesson, but first, um, let’s, let’s, let’s talk about why people say album sales are declining. It’s because they are newsflash. It used to be like to be in the top 10 on billboard, on the albums chart, you’d have to sell like six figures.

[00:01:03] And I remember. To be number one, there’d be like two albums that month, that soul like that week. I mean that like went on sale and sold a million copies. So only one of them could be number one. And this past year, one of my favorite bands to hold steady, got in the top 10 and billboard moving 14,000 units in one day in one week.

[00:01:25] Gosh, I’m doing great at remembering timeframes. Yes. The whole study, 14,000 copies in one week that get some of the top 10 of billboard. That is something that did not, has not happened like 20 years ago, 20 years ago. And before never would have happened. Never, ever, not ever, but now it’s what happens, but you see like stream counts.

[00:01:54] Like people streaming single songs and you see those hitting huge numbers. Billions, billions of streams on Spotify and Spotify has been around since like in America since like 20 12, 20 11, um, probably like 2012. So I mean, streaming. Relatively new, but people were talking about albums being dead before streaming.

[00:02:20] So I think that’s, uh, important to consider when you’re talking about what killed albums. So yeah, w w we can confirm that album sales are down compared to like where they were in like the nineties, right. And the nineties that was very much a heyday of album sales. And I think it’s the modern, that modern lens is making us feel like albums are dead and singles are taking over.

[00:02:53] And I, you know, Singles. Weren’t a big deal in the nineties. Like obviously you have to release singles, you’ve put out a video. Uh, so yeah, I mean, they were a big deal, but people weren’t buying singles one, they didn’t have a way to really buy a single, I mean, if you are a big fan of a band or performer like safety or the apple, maybe you’d buy the CD single.

[00:03:18] If you could find that. Because they were hard to find you to go to a real record store and they might have a copy. The only reason you’d get a CD single, because they’re not smaller, they’re not easier to transport. They’re just a whole ass CD can fit 80 minutes of music on it. And they put two to three songs on it.

[00:03:35] Um, one of those songs is the single, the radio edit worst case scenario. The B side is the album version. Best case scenario. The B side is unreleased or a remix or something kind of. But not a lot of people did that. And you wouldn’t do that just so that you could, like, I don’t know, radio stations probably had him.

[00:03:56] DJs probably had ’em for the most part, your average consumer wasn’t buying singles. We had to buy the whole album and it’s horrible. It’s got burned because the whole album wasn’t very good. I think we’ve all been in that position. We were like, oh yeah, that single is great, but that album is trash and I’m not going to be all.

[00:04:17] I’m telling you my personal examples, because it will get people mad at me and I’m not, I’m not gonna do that. So yeah, I’m not, I’ll you. One more reason to get, be mad at me. You’ll have plenty. So I think. The fact that a lot of us grew up in this era, like I’m 32. So like, this is very, uh, true millennial to older millennial.

[00:04:43] Probably not so much younger millennials. Definitely not zoomers but a lot of us grew up or at least lived through this longer period of time where the whole album was king. And it was, you know, great for record labels because they could charge 18 to 20 bucks a for an album that they sold an FYE or a tower records.

[00:05:07] And, um, which everyone thought was a lot of money back then. Uh, and now, you know, digital album copies are like 10, 10 bucks, but I digress. So we grew up in this era where if you want us in the music, On your own in your home, the really the only format to do that was CDs. Uh, there was an overlap. So let’s, should we just talk about the history a little bit?

[00:05:34] Yeah. Like the one last thing about the modern you, we had to buy the whole CD. It costs you 20 bucks and you might not like it, any of the songs on it. So from a consumer standpoint, it wasn’t a great shakeout. Right. But let’s talk about the history of recording. Of recorded music. I’m excited. I majored in music business at Belmont university.

[00:05:55] I took a whole class class called the history of recorded music. So I’m stoked to talk about it with you. All right. Now the original singles was sheet music. A hit would exist on the radio or just in popular culture. So then like Mary’s notes knows it was a little wouldn’t you? That kind of stuff you take, you buy it, you take it home.

[00:06:16] Someone in your family would know how to play. Hopefully, if not a couple, and that is how you play music. And you know, some people had like player piano, so you could buy the scroll because old school player pianos worked just like an old music box where, um, there’s like a grid and it just, it cranks and it makes the music happen.

[00:06:37] It’s pretty neat. Um, after that we have the phonograph famously invented by Edison. Uh, it was this little tube. And, uh, it worked just like a vinyl record. You would set a needle and it would go through the record like that. Uh, I say record, it was a recording for sure. Uh, these things were pain in the ass, the store, they, you know, they would deteriorate.

[00:07:02] They, they weren’t a forever medium after. Oh, so obviously like one song on a photograph, like three minutes of music and that’s it. And then after that, we moved to . If you have a modern turntable, you might see three speeds. Uh, you’ll see, 33 as in 33 and a third. That’s the number of rotations per minute.

[00:07:24] These are all in rotations. Uh, we have 77 inches. Uh, gosh, I am just blanking on the speed of a seven inch. Uh, and then you have another number on there. Seven inches or 40 fives. Good Lord, Emily there, 40 fives. And then you might see a, I believe it’s 78. I’m actually going to look that up, Sheila. RPM 70 eights.

[00:07:52] So they were called 70 eights because it’s a 78 rotations per minute. And they’re about a 10 inches, about 10 inches big. And they’re made of a material called shellac that was called shellac. So you either call them seventies or shellac. They’d have about one, maybe two songs per side. They couldn’t fit a ton of music on each side.

[00:08:12] Uh, even though they’re obviously have three more inches on. Then 40 fives, they rotate about twice the speed of a 45. Um, but they could fit less music on them partially because of the speed. But here’s a promise. Shellac is, uh, just like a brittle ceramic plate. You hit it on the side of a table. It shattered.

[00:08:34] It’s not a robust median making it not ideal for collectors because it’s just, it’s fragile. Uh, maybe it would exist in a jukebox or something. I’m not entirely sure if you’ve boxes were really a thing. Certainly it’d be played on the radio or you’d have a Victrola at your home. It would spit out the music in that big, um, his master’s voice.

[00:09:00] Cornucopia looking thing. And, uh, yeah, so that was how that was. That was how you could collect music. They weighed a ton, they took up a ton of space. Man. You think vinyl records take up a lot of space. At least you can fit like 30 to 45 minutes of music on a, on a, on a full length of vinyl record instead of like four to eight minutes per side or whatever shellac could it come.

[00:09:27] After that. So the world war II happened and, uh, we there’s a rubber shortage. So I believe it was like, I don’t think it was invented in Athens, Ohio, but polyvinyl chloride started to be produced as an alternative to rubber. And it’s also what is used on a vinyl siding for houses. It’s also what your lovely, beautiful vinyl records are made of PVC.

[00:09:53] Change the history of recorded music. I wrote a whole ass paper about that in college. No one will ever read it, but I’m proud of it. Uh, so polyvinyl, chloride, PVC, it’s a little bit bendable, which means it’s not going to break as easily and, uh, it’s, you can make them lighter weight and you can fit more music on each.

[00:10:15] So that was really cool, but you know, who’s buying full length albums. This didn’t exist as the thing you think about a collection of music outside of musicals and like operas and symphonies, this didn’t exist. Um, bands would have large repertoires sure. A lot of what they knew would be covers. Um, but what bands really focused on and recording.

[00:10:40] We’re singles. The modern record industry is born from singles and then. Those singles were sold primarily to jukeboxes a man named Sam goody comes along, buys the old records from the jukeboxes and started selling them to consumers. Makes the record companies really mad. He gets sued. He wins. That’s why you can buy and sell use records.

[00:11:03] Uh, and if you’re my age or older, you probably remember Sam goody record stores. They still existed. Um, in the late nineties and early two thousands. So the Sam goody was a real person and you can thank him tremendously for, uh, your ability to buy and sell music as you want. Cool. Right. So what would happen is a band would release singles.

[00:11:31] They put enough singles, they could make an album. And then albums did start to gain popularity. One thing that’s kind of interesting about albums is sometimes the single would be used to promote the album and then completely different songs would exist on the album. And the reason artists had for doing this is because they didn’t want to sell someone the same thing twice, you know?

[00:11:52] And also if you got two things, you can sell people, two things. If you only have one, like, and they thought, why would anybody buy the single when they could have it on the album? Back to like the convenience of singles. Yeah. 40 fives, a lot more convenient to carry around. If you’ve seen the movie hairspray, you’ve seen Amanda buy-in’s character, Karen around her little, her little, a container of 40 fives.

[00:12:13] I have a couple of those storage containers are pretty cute, but I mean, you, you. You, you couldn’t carry all that around very well. And you know, if you listen to the 40 fives again, great for DJs and stuff, people spinning music. Great for jukeboxes. I’m grateful since you can say the favorite song over and over, but you know, you could get through more music on an album and you wouldn’t have to flip it.

[00:12:35] It didn’t require as much active listening. Um, so that format gained popularity, but singles never went away. Right. Obviously you can buy singles from literally every decade of recorded music. Even the nineties, there were some seven inches that were sold, but you look into the eighties, you you’d even find like the 12 inch, uh, dance remixes, like prince did tons of special 12 inch remixes of, of his songs.

[00:13:04] Like get, keep people dancing to his songs longer on the dance floor was kind of the idea and it worked. It did. And then we also have, in that timeframe, we have, um, cassette tapes become popular. Cassette singles never really took off, um, in the same way that CD singles never took off. There’s really no benefit of them.

[00:13:26] They were the same size, just less stuff. And also like still had to, you still have to pay more money for them. And then you had eight tracks, uh, which you could actually play in your car, which was pretty cool. Those were pretty short-lived mediums. Basically eight tracks were killed by cassettes.

[00:13:44] Cassettes were killed by CDs, and then vinyl was killed by CDs because vinyl, uh, could degrade it could melt. It could become damage and CDs have a higher quality of fidelity is like after digital recording, that was the idea. So now we’re into the nineties and the nineties, it like record labels really had a hold on how people purchase music, you had to buy CDs and you had to buy the full length of the CDs, unless you could find.

[00:14:13] Like the CD single on dead, duh, you only alternative you had back then was if you still had a cassette player that could record and a turntable and, or an, or a radio, you can make mic. That’s how people used to make mix tapes. They would, uh, like take their turntable, record a song to the next tape. So it was like something that you were doing live.

[00:14:36] And if you wanted to steal music back, then you had to like, listen to the radio. Wait for your song to come on, hit record really quickly. You’d probably lose the first bit. And then the DJ would talk over the ad and it would just, it sucked so that, you know, that was the experience of, of singles. For a very long time.

[00:14:54] All right. So now let’s talk about the modern era. Uh, we’ve talked before about how, um, Napster came along and offered something called peer to peer sharing. The idea was you would connect your computer to another computer and you could have whatever music that they put up into the ether. Uh, it was called torrenting and still exists.

[00:15:19] But it doesn’t really exist for music anymore. And that’s largely because of Spotify, but I don’t want to get there quite yet because there was such a long period between Napster launching and Spotify launching, and a lot happened in between that. So let’s talk. Napster launches in the late nineties, early two thousands record companies say at first, and then they realized people are stealing from them and they lose their shit and start suing fans.

[00:15:50] Great. PR, just beautiful gay people make people really feel bad for these record companies that have been charging. 18 to $20. And essentially, uh, a lot of the private companies would also do a basically price fixing. They would, uh, one thing they would do is they would pay for ads and like print publications for, uh, some very friendly.

[00:16:15] Um, record shops. So when the, when these, these labels wanted to promote their bands and those records, they would work with the record shops and be like, make sure it says, find it at FYE and tell, find it at tower records. But what the record shops had to do is charge more for the. And then you had people like best buy.

[00:16:36] I says to people, companies like best buy collaborations of people, companies like best buy would charge 10 bucks for a CD. The day it came out, uh, as a loss leader to bring people into the store to buy hopefully appliances, because that’s where they made most of the money. And the appliances are recession proof.

[00:16:56] Another digression there. People are always going to need a dishwasher when the dishwasher breaks. Um, yeah, so we, we have you people noticing that CDs are quite expensive and often had thick kind of quality course. There were some masterpieces that came out. Uh, there’s so many albums that were popular that had all killer, no filler.

[00:17:20] Unfortunately, there were a lot of albums that were just really, really bad, and people were getting really tired of it. They had no. To really, unless there was like a listening station, like listened to like try it before they bought it sometime like you can go off of reviews, but like, unless you really agree with the critics at rolling stone all the time and who does yeah.

[00:17:39] You see where I’m going. Um, and then after that, like some companies started to create alternatives to Napster in what these alternatives sought to do, um, was, uh, Make people pay for music again, to put it lightly. There were a lot of problems with, with these, uh, platforms. Um, some of them only had stuff from certain labels.

[00:18:07] It wasn’t really centralized. You had to go to like a bunch of different places to get a bunch of different things. And then iTunes comes along. Was iTunes ever the best when it came to, uh, buying, storing and. Ripping and putting your music on your different devices. Were they ever the best for that?

[00:18:28] Absolutely not. They were always bad. I, it was always bad. Let’s not pretend that I choose. Wasn’t always just awful, but they were one of the first and they were one of the first companies to really put a lot of money behind this big, like home base for your entertainment needs. Cause it pretty quickly, it wasn’t just songs.

[00:18:48] It was videos. Podcasts. Weren’t quite a thing yet, but audio books always were a thing. Like there were always books on tape and CD and stuff like that. So they kind of won and they’ve got to choose their pricing structure. So they decided to charge 99 cents per song or $10 per album. And if I remember correctly, not all albums, let you download singles or just specific songs.

[00:19:16] But a lot of them did. And one cool thing that they did was, uh, you rent a movie on iTunes and then you think, oh man, I would really love to buy that. But then the rental fee, doesn’t also count toward like, if you wanted to buy it full out. So you think to yourself, oh, I could pay like six bucks to rent it right now.

[00:19:34] Or I can just buy it for forever for 12 bucks or whatever yet you can’t do that with movie. You could almost always do it from what I remember with digital albums. So you could try it before you bought it, and you can even listen to a preview of every song from the comfort of your own home. You can see how this is appealing to people, right?

[00:19:55] Like, let’s be honest. Like there, there are people who’ve always listened to the whole CD. Now I’m guilty of it too. I love albums, but even on albums, I love I’ll be like, listen that same song over and over, over and over hit back, back, back. Back back. Like there, there are songs where I can’t listen to them just one time.

[00:20:15] And then sometimes it takes me like a week and a half to get through a record because by the time I get to the second song that I want to hear the second song again and again, and again, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a vicious cycle. It’s a vicious cycle. But with iTunes, you could just download the songs that you knew you liked.

[00:20:31] And you would know that I decided to buy the rest. I can complete the album and it’s going to take into account that I already bought one of the songs. So even if a song, even the album had 15 songs, which does happen, which is kind of bananas and really. It’s too much. It’s too much songs unless you are guided by voices, then like 15 songs.

[00:20:52] Wasn’t $15. 15 songs was $10 with exceptions. Don’t tell me there were exceptions. I know there were exceptions. It is okay. It is fine. I’m talking in broad strokes here. So yeah, you can, you can’t really blame people for looking at their. Free weekly free out weekly and seeing that they could go to FYE to buy the new, um, I don’t know, blur record, or they could download it for half, literally half the price.

[00:21:26] Now I have to go to the mall and you know what? They could just download the blur songs they want until. Fantastic. You cannot blame consumers for wanting to do that. The thing is you can’t blame consumers for any of this stuff, really? Because we were so abused for so long, we truly were all Vietnam is abused as the artists.

[00:21:47] So when you look at that and that trend has just continued through the decades, uh, even looking at it back then, I mean, there are obviously reasons why bands should, uh, put out full length records. I feel like I’ve talked about that before. Um, but you know, one of the reasons is that it’s a lot harder to get press as an independent artist, uh, from a single it’s possible.

[00:22:14] And it happens obviously, but doing things like touring, getting a lot of press behind a single that’s a lot harder than an entire record. So that’s one of the reasons. It’s still important for bands to, to create records. And, you know, as far as like consumption goes, I think it exists kind of like on an inverse bell curve, where over here you have indie bands, indie bands can release an album.

[00:22:40] People are probably going to buy the whole album and not the single over here yet. Taylor swift, Beyonce and Adele people will buy the whole album. Of course, more people, a lot of people buy singles, but tons of healer buying the whole album. And then in the middle of. You have a lot of bands who have a hit song who, you know, probably still sell a lot of copies of the record, but most people buy the singles because it’s a lot like indie bands.

[00:23:10] You can support, you want to support them. You probably aren’t hearing their singles on the radio. Big ax, you know, that every single song on that Adele record is going to make you cry and hurt you in a very good way. And then in the middle it’s it’s stuff, you can’t commit to as much because you’re not as familiar with it.

[00:23:28] And because you’ve heard the single, I’m never bought a Bruno Mars record. Sure. I brought, bought Bruno Mars singles, probably a bad example. Listen, uptown funk is a great song. I don’t care if you think. Um, yeah, so it’s kinda like the bell curve of, of popularity. You know, and we already talked about some album sales were saved because iTunes would let you complete the album.

[00:23:53] Uh, and then we have streaming.

[00:24:00] All right. Let, let me talk a little bit about CDs too, because, uh, we, we talk about peer-to-peer killing the record industry. A big part of that was also what they call borrowed a burn. And that is when you have one person in your friend group of buy the CD and the rest of you would rip it to your computer or you get a burn copy.

[00:24:19] So you could still listen to that as much as you wanted and you’d have to pay for it. One person pays for it and then 10 people will do it. Even people who aren’t tech savvy could do this. And you can do. Awesome playlists and you’d have to, you’d have to make them in real time. Like it used to be, you had, you’d be listening to the playlist as you were making it.

[00:24:41] Now you can just rattle them off and you can do it in an afternoon, like an hour afterschool, like, and then you can return the CD to your friend. The next day, Spotify killed both of those things. Just killed them. Spotify did effectively kill peer to peer, which is what the music industry. To happen.

[00:25:02] However, it wasn’t really replaced by a medium that was super, um, conducive to artists making money. And there are a couple of reasons artists will make money on streaming. It used to be in record labels. Streaming was such a minute part of your deal that you, as a musician, just wouldn’t ask for a better, a better split on it.

[00:25:24] You’d be like, oh, I’d rather have the CD. Like, uh, I’d rather make, um, 95 cents per album sold before. It was a lot. Uh, and then like get a little bit of this other revenue, which is why I think the nineties were probably the worst time to sign a record deal, but I digress again and that’s like my third digression.

[00:25:50] Whoops. So Spotify, there was a free version. Still is hooks a lot of people in how so? How, how do you, how do artists get paid from those free lessons? Ads? Okay. Sounds expensive. It’s actually really, really cheap to run a Spotify ad campaign. Your minimum is a $200. It’s really, really cheap. It’s also not particularly effective.

[00:26:18] And then you have people who pay like. I think the average is like $10 for like a premium subscription or something like that. I don’t know the exact numbers, but you can buy. So you talked about iTunes. You can buy a record on iTunes for 10 bucks, or you could have access to almost all of human’s.

[00:26:39] Humanity’s known recorded music for $10 a month. You can’t blame the consumer. For making the decision that consumers are going to make the decision that is best for them. Um, you can educate people to explain to them why they should support music, but most people don’t notice music until it’s gone. If you ever go into a restaurant and you’re hanging out and you’re having a good time and, and then you stop and like, why is the vibe suddenly so weird?

[00:27:06] And you realize this because the music stopped oral, that music is really terrible. It’s hard to convince people of that. So.

[00:27:16] Yeah, musicians don’t get paid for the streams because of record label contracts. And because Spotify doesn’t really pay that much per stream fun fact, Napster pays more per stream than Spotify. Yes. Napster still exists. It does not resemble old naps or at all, but still exists and it pays artists, a penny per stream.

[00:27:41] That’s a 0.70 cents more than Spotify pays per stream. You know, the bar is in hell, but it’s, it’s still exists. Great. Um, th th th th duh. Great. So what’s killing albums, what’s killing albums, I think primarily it’s, um, the ease of buying single. I mean, you can, you can, you can actually buy a single for 99 cents and that’s bananas.

[00:28:14] Uh, like I don’t really know exactly how much 40 fives used to cost, but they cost a quarter in 1960. That’d be $2 and 25 cents now. So already a downloaded song is between 99 cents and a dollar and 29 cents. Regardless, that’s at least a dollar off of what it should be if singles. We’re 40 we’re 45 in 1960 we’re 25 cents.

[00:28:40] Um, a record that was, um, monophonic in, in Moto, uh, would have been $2 in 1960. That’s $18 now. So actually, and then I think, uh, an element stereo would have been twice that, so like $36. So when FYE was charging $18 in 1999, for that blur CD, they were actually more in line with inflation then than we are now.

[00:29:13] And you wonder why musicians don’t have any money? Not that musicians were always getting all that $18. Usually they were not, but still it’s, it’s wild that we’ve basically devalued music by refusing to allow it, to keep up with inflation. Even, even, even since like 2001 or whatever. In 20 years, the cost of buying a single has not changed a penny, not at all.

[00:29:40] How is that possible? I’m not saying like, w like I would be happy if, if prices increase for music. Cause then obviously, like my costs for music to consume it are going to increase, but it’s, it’s wild that like minimum wage is barely kept up with inflation since then. Better than recorded music, then. And I think it just really goes to show that labels seem to consider recorded music as a loss leader, like best buy would use recorded music to get people to go in and buy, buy appliances.

[00:30:21] It’s like record labels are taking recorded music and places like iTunes are taking recorded music and using it as a loss leader to. See the tour to buy merge to get it in movies, which has a larger payout for synchronization. That’s another reason albums just aren’t taking off is because the promotion machine doesn’t really care what it is as long as it’s enough to get out there.

[00:30:49] Again, the only reason I see to really release a full record, like every couple of years than to do a single every couple of months. Is because you need something to tour behind. And if you’re a pop star who does, like, I don’t know if I, I don’t know, I don’t know about the touring aspect, but I dunno, puff stars come out with records.

[00:31:15] They also come out with singles. The, all these people still have albums, you know, the biggest pop stars in the world. Taylor swift, Beyonce, Adele. They still do album. So, I don’t really know why people are saying that out. Like I’ll have an art format. I don’t think is going to die because I think people like to, to create them.

[00:31:33] I think that, uh, unless, unless the way that PR and the promotion machine works changes to, to the point where, like, you don’t have to have an album out to headline a tour, maybe people don’t spend all the money to buy. An album and to print an album, the biggest physical sales right now are vinyl records.

[00:31:55] And there’s like an eight month lead time on like pressing those that’s like doubled it’s doubled since COVID basically, I think it used to be like four months now it’s six to eight months and some places just aren’t accepting new, new acts. They are like the record pressing plants are turning people away.

[00:32:17] Because they can’t fill it or they’d rather save that space for the bigger performers. So, yeah, maybe that’s another reason it’s just so expensive to create two, to spend multiple days in the studio to Nixon master. Tens 12 songs. Like if you’re smart, mixed to master 14 to 16 songs. So you have some B sides and unreleased stuff, um, to, to physically to create physical copies of this distribution sheet, go to distro kid.com/vip/get offset to save 7% on your annual district membership.

[00:32:57] And. You know, it’s and then you had to hire a youth, hire a publicity company that costs hundreds of dollars a month on the low end. Like it’s, it’s a lot of expense. So you can kind of understand the appeal of just throwing singles out there, seeing what sticks. And then if something sticks creating an album based on that side.

[00:33:20] Might be the smarter way to go, because you can be nimble on singles. You can change your entire sound between singles. Um, the band striking matches one year did three EPS and three different genres. I don’t know if they were just like throwing it out there to see what stuck and what really resonated with people more.

[00:33:38] But that is a tactic you could do to. You know, try to increase your odds of success, of connecting with people, because you can fake a lot in this industry. You can fake how well you sing. You can fake how well you write. You cannot fake whether or not what you’re creating is connecting with people. I’ve said that before.

[00:33:56] I’ll say it again. You can put it on the gravestone. You can. All right. Um, you know, and, and last thing I want to say is there are a lot of music fans who just don’t care about all that. That’s fine, but there are a lot of people who really love them. And I do believe that as long as people love and care about albums, um, artists will continue to make them and not just the singles, but I don’t know if it’s necessarily something that we should be having a panic about as far as the state of albums versus the state of singles.

[00:34:31] And I’m going to tell you why. It’s because the music industry was always born of singles. Uh, again, and I just really want us in this home. Full lengths are relatively modern. I mean, if you look at the history of recorded music, albums have existed since, you know, the beginning of it, but the popularity of them, I think really, really kicked off in the seventies and eighties and nineties.

[00:34:57] So, I mean, it might, maybe it’s sick. I really don’t know. I don’t, I’m not, I think Niels Bohr said prediction is very difficult, especially in the future. And, uh, it’s hard to argue with a physicist like that. I think he was a physicist. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that quote was in the graduation speech I gave in high school, but you know, in albums also, they can take it out of people.

[00:35:22] You look at people like Jimmy Hendrix, who did an album every year, he got so burned out and you know, he died. And then you have, you know, people who just live off of making albums like prince, and that’s what they love to do. And you have people who make albums and didn’t want to tour like Michael Jackson because Michael Jackson made so much per record that he didn’t need it to, are you on tour when he needed money?

[00:35:44] So, you know, musicians are going to create the way they want. And consumers are going to consume the way they want to consume. And I would love to see more people invest in music and support bands. I personally think that, uh, oh, the last thing I need in the world is another t-shirt, but I bought one from my local record store, Sonic boom for record store day.

[00:36:08] That makes us very, very timely record store day is another thing. Albums. It’s a lot of albums, but it’s also a lot of singles. And sometimes I think the singles are more exciting in how much did they charge for these vinyl singles? Like 7, 8, 12 bucks keeping up with inflation a little bit better. So the artist can get more money in their pockets.

[00:36:30] Well, I’m sorry that this was such a long schpiel, but thank you for watching. Thanks for understanding, please like comment, subscribe below. Tell me your thoughts about albums versus singles and why you think that albums are declining, or even if you do think they’re declining. Actually, a lot of albums get released every year.

[00:36:52] Tons more, literally more than can be listened to. So check out my music at Emily fucking hairstyle. Bye.