Downloads Make Singles a Hit Again

Says artist manager Jim Guerinot, whose clients include pop singer Gwen Stefani and the rock bands Nine Inch Nails and Hot Hot Heat: "While somebody might view a scene from a play as being really well done, well performed and well written, most artists would prefer to have you watch the entire play. Musicians put their music out in a long-form format, complete with artwork, and their preference would be for you to experience their work that way."

And besides, Guerinot says, there are the obvious economic considerations: Artists typically receive between 14 and 24 cents on the dollar (or, rather, the 99 cents) for the sale of a digital single, whereas they earn closer to $2 on the sale of a full-length album.

"I'd rather sell a pack of gum than a stick of gum," he says. "I mean, you don't see Marlboro wheeling out single cigarettes in racks. They'd rather sell you the carton."

Stefani's "Hollaback Girl," which is up for record of the year at the Grammys, has sold 1.24 million copies, while "Love. Angel. Music. Baby," a contender for album of the year, has sold 3.6 million copies.

But, harking back to the '50s and '60s -- before 45s began to give way to LPs, as the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys helped to pull popular music into the album era -- many popular acts are now selling more singles than albums.

Lifehouse, a Southern California rock band, has sold 887,000 digital copies of its hit single "You and Me" -- and just 770,000 copies of the album that includes the single.

"There's really not that much money to be made on 99 cents," says Jason Wade, Lifehouse's singer, guitarist and songwriter. "It's better than nothing. It's better than people getting your song for free. But it's not big money. . . . You even wind up losing some album sales, because if you have a hit single now, a lot of people will just download the one song instead of buying the album."

That may be what's happening with D4L, whose album "Down for Life" has sold 304,000 copies -- a paltry number compared with the strong sales of "Laffy Taffy."

But, says label chief Moscowitz: "I don't look at the album sales as a disappointment at all." He notes that weekly sales of "Down for Life" increased by roughly 50 percent between the second week of November, when the album was released, and Christmas -- a rarity in rap, where sales typically peak during the first week of an album's availability. "To me," he says, "that's a sign that people are converting over and buying into the group. And that singles sales didn't necessarily erode the album sales."

For decades, singles have been a concern to record executives, who worry that an individual hit will cannibalize album sales. Singles have long been a challenge for record companies to monetize, too -- particularly during the 1990s, when widespread discounting drove the retail price of CD singles below the break-even point and labels cut back on the practice of releasing individual songs commercially. Consumers who liked a hit they'd heard on the radio or seen on a music-video program often faced a choice: Buy the full-length CD that spawned the hit, or don't own the song at all.

"Record companies would tell me, 'We're not going to put a single out, because it's really the only great song on the album,' " says Billboard's Mayfield.

It wasn't until the late '90s that music fans discovered a new method to get their favorite songs: Download them illegally and (potentially) face the wrath of the RIAA legal team. (It's still a popular option: Big Champagne Online Media Measurement estimates that more than 250 million tracks are downloaded worldwide each week from file-swapping services.)