Unbundling The Album: A Business Case For Releasing Single Songs
Many fans prefer buying singles instead of the whole album. Most agree with this and yet, the music industry has stubbornly stuck with the business model of releasing albums. On Music Think Tank, Frank Woodworth has written an essay to prove that selling single songs can be better than selling albums.
“In a song based system, there is always something new to engage the media. If an album of songs is released, you lose that newness factor when pitching for placement.”
(Read On)
Share on:
Releasing tracks individually doesn’t make sense based on consumer behavior. Consumers like to “fall down the rabbit hole.” Look at data from Youtube for example, when someone has multiple videos available they tend to be able to grab 10-15% of viewers to watch an additional video as long as the first was compelling content. On streaming services, singles released always have less listeners than albums because only fans are taking the time to listen to the single/add it to their collection when passive listeners are sampling the full albums.
The single club model is looking at itunes sales and making an inaccurate conclusion towards listener habits.
This is a big who cares. Album vs single is now an artistic decision for the most part. Hey and guess what, some of us are still selling discs and vinyl. You can arrange these numbers to formulate a number of conclusions. Without a comprehensive research i.e. actually questioning consumers directly about purchasing habits, this is all as we say in the business “do doo.”
part of the reason that labels keep “insisting” on releasing albums or eps is because no one reviews singles. no marketing = no sales. very simple. plus, i think the tech-crazed media is putting way too much emphasis on “kids and singles.” ya, kids buy singles, but they also buy eps and albums.
I’ve been releasing songs this year on an ‘as soon as they’re ready’ basis, and am aiming at (and so far stuck to) once every 2 weeks. It’s a year long project True, not lots of sales so far. But after only the 3rd release there has been a definite increase in visits to my websites, increases in my mailing list and fan page sign-ups and a slowly increasing list of media and radio (online and community) wanting to be forwarded each release. I think there is more pressure under this method to make each song a ‘single’ or at least notable song (put out a crap song on an album and people just skip it) and it can certainly be a bigger work load. But regularity of releases can, I think, ‘engage’ an audience on-goingly and keep them interested in coming back to your web spaces. And more so, I just like the artistic challenge of it
Maurice,
I agree it is unproven, and I would like more data. I lay out 4 kinds of information that would either prove or disprove the theory, and if anyone has it, I will gladly do a follow up, with charts and graphs and bells and whistles.
Ha’s (I’m sure his real name)claim that streaming services have more albums than single streams is something that would disprove the theory – I’d like to see real data though, rather than an insistence by an anonymous commenter.
Maurice,
I agree it is unproven, and I would like more data. I lay out 4 kinds of information that would either prove or disprove the theory, and if anyone has it, I will gladly do a follow up, with charts and graphs and bells and whistles.
Ha’s (I’m sure his real name)claim that streaming services have more albums than single streams is something that would disprove the theory – I’d like to see real data though, rather than an insistence by an anonymous commenter.
Labels release Albums because artists and bands keep making them. As to do fans buy them…….
“Total Album sales were up for the first time since 2004 (1.3%) with sales totaling 330.6 million compared to 326.2 million in 2010.”
http://www.narm.com/news/nielsen-billboard-2011-music-industry-report/
Looks like they still do….
1.3% is essentially flat. If you download and read the entire report you reference you find out that Digital sales and digital track sales are rising at a faster rate.
For the first time, digital music sales are larger than physical sales; accounting for 50.3% of all music purchases in 2011.
Digital track sales set a new record and break the 1.2 BILLION sales mark for with 1.27 billion sales in 2011. That’s an increase of 100 million sales (8.4%) over 2010’s digital track sales total.
Now just because there is a one year bump or even several year trend does not mean that it will continue, but it doesn’t mean it won’t either.
1.3% is essentially flat. If you download and read the entire report you reference you find out that Digital sales and digital track sales are rising at a faster rate.
For the first time, digital music sales are larger than physical sales; accounting for 50.3% of all music purchases in 2011.
Digital track sales set a new record and break the 1.2 BILLION sales mark for with 1.27 billion sales in 2011. That’s an increase of 100 million sales (8.4%) over 2010’s digital track sales total.
Now just because there is a one year bump or even several year trend does not mean that it will continue, but it doesn’t mean it won’t either.