got for Christmas, and then wonder how you’re ever going to find them on there, you can ponder for a moment the disappearance of all the hardware that used to be involved with being a music fan — and its consequences.
In spite of being based around a collection of captured sound waves, recorded music was once very much a part of our physical, tangible world. To actually own a piece of someone’s artistic vision, we bought the CDs, before that the cassettes, and before that it was 12-inch, two-sided wax albums or the two-sided, two-song “45s.”
It’s still standard practice for artists to release albums and spin singles off of those, but online shoppers can buy the songs individually from nearly any online service you can name. It’s easy to imagine the concept album — or the concept of an album — going the way of the Victrola.
The single was the backbone of the music industry before the Beatles turned the process of assembling songs for an album into an art. You got more for your money, the artists were able to get less radio-friendly songs into their fans’ hands, and it was a lot more convenient than getting up every three minutes to flip the record over.
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