100 and Single by Chris Molanphy

The single, or the album: what is the unit of measure for music? The industry’s attempt to limit sales of hits on iTunes is just the latest battle in an endless war.

Imagine, for a moment, that supermarkets only carried milk by the gallon.

If you love milk or have kids, you probably wouldn’t mind – growing boys and girls drink it by the thermos-load. But the quart of milk makes much more sense if you’re single, or part of a childless couple, like me. Someday, when my wife and I have kids, I’ll buy milk by the gallon. But currently, I only need a splash of milk for my cup of tea in the morning, maybe a half-cup when I’m home on weekends and eating cereal. My wife doesn’t use milk much at all. At our consumption rate, if we bought milk by the gallon, we’d be throwing out a good deal of spoilage.

So, if supermarkets only offered milk by the gallon, I would either be complaining, finding someone who’d sell me milk by the quart, or throwing a good deal of money away. Or – just maybe – I’d learn to do without milk in my tea.

This blog is about music, so you know where I’m going with this, but before I make my connection between milk and music, between gallons and albums – I admit, a flimsy and not-quite-apt metaphor – let’s consider another, more puffed-up metaphor. This one was provided a month ago to The New York Times, by a minor record-industry mogul:

Tony Brummel, the owner of the independent rock label Victory Records, says he is not interested in selling individual songs from his albums, though he may give them away to build buzz. The label this week captured the No. 3 spot on the chart with the new album from the emo-rock band Hawthorne Heights…. A rock album, Mr. Brummel said, “is a work of art.”“If you’re buying a Picasso,” he continued, “you can’t just buy the upper right-hand corner.”

Yeah, right. My music-as-milk metaphor may be way too simplistic – songs don’t spoil, and they’re certainly not as interchangeable as glasses of moo juice – but Brummel’s album-as-Picasso metaphor is a load of crap, too.

What Brummel doesn’t get – what the entire music industry doesn’t get – is that, to most music listeners, a hit single is not a corner of a Picasso painting – it is a Picasso, in toto. An album, meanwhile, is Picasso’s entire Blue Period. While it’s rewarding for a Picasso fan to review the Blue Period, a more casual art lover will be perfectly happy to stand for four minutes in front of The Old Guitarist.

Brummel’s metaphor comes at the end of a recent Times article that finds the music industry experimenting with new limitations on hit singles on iTunes. Three years ago this month, Apple’s digital song-selling service – the first successful attempt to sell music on the Internet legally – opened for business. It prompted a rebirth in the dormant singles market, but already, the industry wants to rein it in so they can sell more full-length albums.

The iTunes store has succeeded so well that the major labels are fearful that their cash-cow album business is suffering – even while iTunes songs, unlike illegal wares, accrue profits to their bottom line. It seems that a 99-cent download of, say, “Pon’ the Replay” is more appealing than buying an entire CD by fledgling pop star Rihanna, but the download is less profitable for the label. So Island Def Jam, Rihanna’s label, is withholding her newest hit single, “S.O.S.,” from iTunes altogether. This is but one of several such experiments – mostly on R&B/hip-hop singles – going on right now. Ne-Yo’s recent chart-topping ballad “So Sick” was withheld from iTunes while it amassed months of heavy radio airplay; the label wouldn’t relent until the week of the full CD’s release. The result: both the album and “So Sick” shot to the top of their respective Billboard charts.

In short, the record labels are trying, not for the first time in their history, to force us to consume music by the gallon.

Both my milk metaphor and Brummel’s Picasso metaphor are badly imprecise. But you can’t blame either one of us: The entire debate that’s raged between music fans and the recording industry, since the late ’90s and the launch of Napster, has been stymied by the lack of a good metaphor. What do you call a work of art made up of groups of smaller, but complete, works of art? Music, as a consumable good, is more singular (no pun intended) than either its consumers or its sellers even realize.

Seriously, try it yourself: what’s it like to consume music? When you buy a CD because you love a hit song, could we say that it’s like buying a Whitman’s chocolate sampler, or a box of Twinings assorted teas? The hit single would be the yummy caramel piece or the Irish Breakfast sachet – you bought the multipack to get the one item you actually wanted. If you’re lucky, you might find you like the coconut-filled piece or the Darjeeling teabag as much or better.

But that’s not quite right. After you satisfy your initial craving for one piece of chocolate or one cup of tea, you won’t be satisfied tonight or tomorrow. When you run out of caramel pieces or Irish Breakfast bags, you’re stuck with all the flavors you don’t want. But a great song can be played today, and then again tomorrow (hell, again five minutes from now), and it just might satisfy your fix for that musician, permanently. If you love the Whitman’s caramel piece, you’ll feel compelled to eat more Whitman’s eventually. But “Come on Eileen” is probably the only Dexy’s Midnight Runners song you’ll ever need to own. This metaphor doesn’t even work for those artists you do enjoy at album length. A full box of Whitman’s or Twining’s is not like a great album; the bag of English Breakfast doesn’t improve the taste of the bag of Earl Grey – the way, say, “Don’t Stop” sounds even better followed by “Go Your Own Way.”

If it seems crass to be comparing songs to comestibles, let’s try comparing music to other creative endeavors. This is, surprisingly, not much better. Music – at least in its popular, nonclassical form – doesn’t lend itself to comparison with another art medium as easily as you’d guess.

You think: Well, if Nevermind were Hamlet or The Godfather, then “Smells Like Teen Spirit” would be the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy or the Corleone wedding scene. But what if “Teen Spirit” is the only Nirvana song you like? Okay, that’s unlikely, but…what if it’s the song that gets you amped up, the only Nirvana song you need to hear day to day? “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sold a million singles back in 1991, and it’s safe to say not every last one of those buyers went on to purchase Nevermind. But a fan of The Godfather’s wedding scene will almost always consume that scene as part of the larger movie. Sure, you could zap your Godfather DVD over to the Luca Brasi sequence and stop there – if you’ve already seen the movie a zillion times. But you’d never purchase a DVD containing just that scene. You’d never go to a theater to watch a really great performance of Hamlet’s two best monologues and nothing else.

This is the root of the problem: rarely in our culture has there been a consumable good that is both so ephemeral and so long-lasting. It’s both an artistic and an economic dilemma – it’s what makes selling music cruel to both the record label and the artist. (Imagine, for a moment, how surreal it must be to be Sir Mix-a-Lot.) A song is so satisfying by itself that, while you will inevitably want to buy other songs, you might never need to acquire others by the same artist. If I may try one last food simile, the hit single is like Willy Wonka’s proverbial Everlasting Gobstopper. If it never loses its flavor, why would you buy another one?

This is the root of the singles-versus-albums debate, and it’s a half-century old. Classical, with its long pieces punctuated by movements, never really had this problem. Neither did jazz, with its emphasis on performance and improvisation. But ever since gramophone records became a mass medium in the early 20th century, the industry has been trying to get the content – songs that could fit on one side of a 78-RPM platter, for instance – to follow the format they found most profitable.

For a while, that demand for profitability actually meant singles. As late as the mid-’60s, labels actually encouraged artists to keep churning out songs they could sell individually. Even as rock acts started to think of their artistic statements in terms of albums, labels would demand hit-bound songs in-between album releases that could be sold as a 45 and tide fans over until the next LP.

It’s laughable to even consider this now, but in 1966, while the Beatles were working on what became Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, EMI stole two of the catchiest songs from the sessions (”Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever”) and issued them as a chart-topping “double-A-side” single; the Beatles left the songs off the album, released months later. Nowadays, that would be unthinkable. The label would release “Penny Lane” to deejays, “work it” to radio for six months or so and then, with carefully planned synergy, release an album with the built-in hit while working a second single. Rather than being the singles-free “concept” album we know, Sgt. Pepper would have been strip-mined for hit after hit.

And would that have been so bad? For one thing, the idea of the single-free, artistically “pure” album has proved to be (mostly) a crock, the occasional Led Zeppelin or Radiohead album notwithstanding. But there was a bigger problem with Sgt. Pepper, which officially kicked off the “album era” (even thought it followed Pet Sounds by months and several Frank Sinatra concept albums by a decade, but never mind): it gave the music industry a new business model – one to which it still mindlessly clings, 40 years later.

Once labels saw that long-playing albums could sell as well as or better than 45-RPM singles, the whole emphasis changed. Music was meant to be heard, enjoyed, judged and, most important, purchased at length. The standard unit of measure for music became not the song, but the bundle of songs. Labels built their economic foundation around people’s willingness to buy more than one song by an artist at a time.

So began three decades of artistic evolution – the best artists created brilliant, ageless album-length statements – and commercial devolution. In the ’70s, labels treated rock acts as “album acts” and pop and R&B acts as “singles acts,” prioritizing the former and ghettoizing the latter. In the ’80s, labels emphasized albums that could be milked dry for hits: Thriller, Purple Rain, Born in the U.S.A., True Blue, Control, Hysteria, Faith – each spinning off five, six, even seven hits until radio listeners succumbed and bought the damned thing already. At least then, they let you buy the singles, too. By the ’90s, overcome by greed, the labels decided to eliminate singles altogether, withholding radio smashes from the under-$5 market. You like that Fugees song we’ve spread across R&B, rock, top 40 and adult-contemporary radio over the past year? Come and get the full CD, it’s on sale for 16 bucks. Pop lovers got whiplash, as they went from the ’80s mode of hearing hit acts saturate radio with a string of singles to the ’90s model – hearing one hit burned out for the better part of a year. One admiring Billboard article I read in the mid-’90s actually marveled at A&M Records’ ability to promote the Gin Blossoms song “Hey Jealousy” for about 15 months.

When you look at pop-music history this way, the Napster movement at the end of the century can be read as a true, epoch-ending rebellion – not just to the mediocre quality and high prices of CDs in the ’90s, but to an industry that misread human nature back in the ’60s and can’t admit it made a mistake. It’s the songs, stupid! The public has tried to deliver this message to musicians and the industry over and over: let us buy the songs, and we might buy the album too; we learn to love an act one song at a time, not one album at a time. But now that the industry’s economic model – indeed, its entire infrastructure – demands that we buy music in bundles, they can’t bear to dial it back. Not even when iTunes has given them a popular, relatively economical way to do it.

As long as record moguls continue to posture as if albums were indivisible Picassos, the public will continue to rebel, unwilling to pay even the price of a quart of milk. And that’s not fair to anyone, either the people trying to make a buck off the songs or the people hoping to be inspired by them.