Woolworths website recently announced that they would no longer be stocking CD singles citing the “terminal decline” of the format as the main contributor to their decision. I initially greeted this news with a pang of sorrow as I recalled days of purchasing the likes of Will Smith’s Men in Black and C’est La Vie by B*witched (I was 13 ok!) for £1.99. For a purchase such as these you could often get 4 different tracks (or 4 remixes of the same track) on 1 CD single. Value for money or what! But then I remembered that that was 1998; Will Smith has gone from being a well dressed Man in Black, to a shabbily dressed drunken action hero and B*witched are currently working the checkouts at the West Clapham branch of Morrison’s.

Here we are a decade later in 2008 with the wonderful world of downloadable music only a click away. From Abba to ZZ Top and everything in between, it’s out there for our listening delight. And the only room it takes up is a couple of megabytes of our PC, laptop or generic mp3 player.

The downloading of single tracks and whole albums is a different matter.
Personally, I would always prefer to buy a hard copy of an album than download it. There’s a much greater sense of ownership when you can physically own hold the book of work that you’ve just purchased. The old romantic in me also enjoys flicking through the album artwork and reading the album notes too.

People’s music buying habits continue to change and the consumer is the one dictating the direction of CD single sales. This was poignantly illustrated by the success of Gnarls Barkley’s 2006 hit Crazy which reached #1 on downloads alone and more recently, Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, a track that wasn’t even released as a single but still reached #1 on downloaded sales.

The romantics out there would be saddened at the demise of the CD single just as the vinyl is still looked upon with fondness by many music lovers. No such sentiment exists in the world of retail though. Practicality seems to be winning the day here and Woolworths are the one of the first to get off the ever-sinking CD single ship. It may be only a matter of time before the other High Street retailers follow suit.

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