The resurrection of the music single

George Le Masurier

of the Gateway

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” –– Yogi Berra

When I read that Apple’s iTunes had recently surpassed Wal-Mart as the nation’s largest seller of music, I thought about Bill Carter in downtown Gig Harbor.

Bill has been selling CDs from his music store, Sounds Great, for 20 years. He has a loyal customer base, but it’s dwindling. Sales declined 30 percent in January, and in February, he resorted to having a sale for the first time in two decades.

Bill’s just a small-town example of the turmoil within the music industry these days. His big-time peers, like Tower Records, have just given up entirely and closed their doors.

Why? Ask any kid younger than 16 and you’re likely to discover they’ve never bought a CD album. They probably started listening to music on a parent’s iPod and began downloading songs from the Internet, not always from legal sources.

Any child younger than 10 today might grow up without ever buying a CD, because they can get it and listen to it easier from a variety of other sources.

The music industry is struggling because of the demise of the CD. Nielsen SouncScan reports that CD sales were down 16 percent in the first quarter of 2008, while digital downloads were up 36 percent. That’s at least the fifth consecutive year-over-year decline in CD sales.

Online music sources allow a consumer to buy just the single songs they like, usually for about 99 cents, rather than spend $10 to $15 for a CD album of tracks they mostly don’t want.

I bought my first single in the 1950s — “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley — when 45s were all the rage and artists were one-hit wonders. Vinyl LP albums replaced 45 singles in the 1960s, when new artists put together complex works of art, like the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” or rock operas like “Tommy” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The 45 simply couldn’t convey these new political and social messages, so the LP became the standard format.

But then the music industry embraced the digital age in the 1980s and made millions of dollars by converting us all to compact discs. Little did they know at the time that technology would eventually lead us right back to the purchasing of single songs, resurrected in digital format, and threaten to eliminate their most profitable product, the CD.

The once-mighty CD has been reduced to a marking tool to sell concert tickets, T-shirts, ring tones for your mobile phone and other products. Only niche collectors of jazz or classical music buy albums anymore. Nobody wants to pay $15 for a bunch of mediocre songs when they can choose exactly the singles they like.

As we stumble backward to the single songs that stick in our heads, the flavor-of-the-week mentality, perhaps we’ve just come full-circle. Before the early technology made the recording industry possible with 78s, musicians used to make their living playing live.

The new technology has so constricted the flow of money from recordings that musicians are once again returning to live performances as primary sources of income.

None of this bodes well for Bill Carter, who squeaks out a living by selling silver disks down there on Judson Street.

But those who still enjoy holding something in their hands and gazing on the cover art and reading the liner notes — young people would call them dinosaurs — are helping him survive.