[kmeisthax]

The music industry in the 90s was so dead-set on albums because albums were their cash cow. You see, when CDs came out, the industry realized it was the perfect gimmick to sell you your whole music collection all over again, now in crystal-clear digital audio. So much so that new industry labeling standards had to be made just to distinguish between re-releases and new all-digital recordings[0].

Problem is, you can only sell people better versions of the same White Album before they have perfect copies of the master tapes, after which anything higher quality is just snake oil. They didn't want the boom to end, so they pushed hard for all their artists to release albums, even if singles made more sense for them. The music industry didn't have a glut of good songs that needed to get packed onto albums for efficiency. They were larding up discs with cheaply-produced filler songs to justify charging album prices for a single.

Also, fun fact: the original plan for CD singles was to package them on smaller discs; Sony even made a portable CD player sized specifically for them. That would have further reduced the distribution and production costs of singles, as they'd take up less shelf space and use less polycarbonate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code

[onlypassingthru]

> the original plan for CD singles was to package them on smaller discs

It wasn't just a plan. CD (Maxi) Singles were released in European markets in the 80s.[0]

[0]https://www.discogs.com/release/126156-Madonna-Like-A-Prayer...

[weinzierl]

There were even business card sized and shaped ones. I remember an article in a computer magazine which warned against using them in the brand new generation of quad speed drives because the unbalanced mass would ruin your expensive CD-ROM drive.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSrOMTr...

[quesera]

We had them in the US too.

Tray-based CD players had a separate, smaller, indent of about 2.5" (6.35cm :) diameter which would accept them.

[toast0]

a) so much for the metric system :P

b) How does that have a 12 inch extended remix and a 12 inch club mix if it's only a 3 inch CD? Magic!

c) I love how the packaging makes the small cute cd single big again. Kind of like the longboxes for full length CDs, before jewel cases dominated.

[hluska]

Being an electronic music fan in the Canadian prairies in the 1990s made for some really bizarre sentences. You could drive 250 kilometres to pick up the new Stickman 12 inch. Stickman was a house label out of Toronto.

Or you would pay an obscene amount of money for a 12 inch from Germany because you really wanted the 7 inch remix on the B side.