I bought “American Boy” actually at the Zune Store (yes, I have a Zune, and yes, I love it). It still shows in the store, but as “in collection”, so i’m not sure if it’s available there (though the remixes definitely are). It’s a stupid marketing concept (the retract of singles) because,

1) I did buy the single then bought the physical album..
2) others won’t really give a hoot to buy in unless they’re a rabid Estelle fan, otherwise they’ll forget the song in 2 weeks when the next pop thing is out.

It’s a cheat to force up album sales despite any quality (not saying Estelle’s album is unworthy), since at least in the 80s albums “earned” their sales by having 3-5 singles on them.

Peace.

In those days (and before), if you heard a song on the radio that you liked, you might want to know whether the whole album was just as good (= worth buying) – especially if the song was not released as a single. The primary sources of critical opinion back then were largely newspapers and magazines, and even with these you might only get the opinion of a handful of reviewers. The smaller the pool of reviews, the less information you had go by, possibly leading to some regrettable purchases (First Band on the Moon, anyone?)

So, with such little information available to the consumer, record companies were more capable of sneaking a one-hit wonder past an ill-informed public. Now, of course, mp3 blogs and sites like Metacritic allow us to sample the opinion of a lot reviewers at once, and we can get a better sense of whether an entire album is worth purchasing.

Which brings us to the case of Kid Rock – I’d say he’s fairly critic-proof, so for him, it may be a smart strategy to put the consumer in an all-or-nothing position with regards to buying his album. The person who digs “All Summer Long” probably isn’t going to wonder what the Village Voice has to say about Rock N Roll Jesus.

For emerging artists (like Estelle), however, perhaps this approach isn’t such a bright idea, since a consumer might do more research to find out whether the whole album is worth buying. If the collective critical opinion is that the single is the only bright spot on the album, then the consumer might just skip it and spend his or her entertainment dollar elsewhere.

Of course, maybe the series started this decade, in which case, nevermind.

The labels are (as always) just playing games as they wait out the birth of some new technological revolution, one in which they control the means and method by which music is distributed and, ultimately, played by consumers. The question I have is whether or not the game they’re playing is one in which they are maximizing their profits based on consumer trending or, conversely, attempting to manipulate consumer trending based on the projects (or products, to them) that they have the most financial control over. That is to say, projects where the artist has been paid so little and relinquished enough front-end control over the finished recordings that labels can afford to sink much more money into the marketing & promotion..

Anyways, now I’m going to go read Ned’s post on the matter.

I’d actually throw it into the large pool of things the labels are doing to boost Amazon at iTunes’ expense, from no DRM (18 months after Steve Jobs’s let’s-drop-the-DRM letter) to cheaper pricing. I bet Atlantic keeps the Estelle album on there for a while, as an experiment at best, a fuck-you to Jobs at worst.

What I kind of chickened out from saying in my original comment is that would follow that the other thing that isn’t being said here is that the white, blue collar audience (er, Kid Rock listeners) don’t buy music online either. The difference, of course, being that this assumption has apparently been part of the strategy from the beginning (I’m sure someone somewhere has numbers that break down iPod ownership, car stereo buying habits, etc. for this demo — or I guess they do). I wish I could see a breakdown of where Kid Rock’s sales are coming from, though I can make a pretty good guess given the limited number of places left to buy an album that’s not iTunes. By which I mean: Wal-Mart.

[www.amazon.com]

For the entirety of its brief, strange 1995 chart run, the PJ single was listed as “Jeremy/Yellow Ledbetter.” Which, I’m totally confident, is the real reason that single sold enough copies to chart all those years later–it was the first time “Ledbetter” had ever been available at normal-priced U.S. retail, and in the subsequent three years, as I’m sure you know, it had become not just a fan favorite but a huge radio-gold rotation monster.

In fact, I kind of don’t know why Billboard didn’t list the single as “Yellow Ledbetter/Jeremy,” as per their A/B-sides policy in the mid-’90s of listing whichever song was receiving the most airplay first.* I mean, I remember pretty firmly that by 1995 or so, on my local radio stations, “Jeremy” was a rock-radio recurrent but “Ledbetter” (and “Black”) were getting played like near-new hits even on my Top 40 station. Anyway, go figure.

* – For example, in 1997, the big smash Elton John song for Princess Diana started its life listed on the Hot 100 as “Candle in the Wind 1997/Something About the Way You Look Tonight,” but then flipped the other way halfway through its No. 1 run, because A/C and Top 40 radio were actually playing “Something” but had long stopped playing the Diana-tribute tune.

This was also the period when Wherehouse started dealing in used CDs and Sony declared that they would not accept ANY opened returns from us anymore claiming that their manufacturing process was flawless and they produced no bad disks (typically labels allowed between 5-10% RTV for defects at the time). The same week Sony recalled several hundred thousand units of several big albums for manufacturing defects.

To summarize: In the 6-7 years I worked music retail I learned the labels are evil and not to be trusted.