A major record label which is home to U2 and Arcade Fire has signalled the end of an era for music fans by stopping the production of singles, except for “rare exceptions”.
Mercury Records will no longer schedule CD and vinyl versions of singles and will now rely almost entirely on downloads.
The company will only create physical versions when it is guaranteed to make a profit, after it lost money on them as a whole last year.
Label bosses have stopped lining up physical versions of singles with immediate effect, unless there is an “exceptional circumstance”.
Ironically, Mercury is home to Sir Elton John, whose Candle In the Wind (1997) is still the biggest selling single of all time in the UK.
And Sir Paul McCartney, who played on and owns the world’s most valuable single, a one-off pressing of That’ll Be the Day by his pre-Beatles band The Quarry Men, saw his most recent live album released by Mercury.
It comes as physical sales make up an ever-dwindling proportion of the chart, usually well below one per cent. In one recent week, combined vinyl and CD sales in the top 50 totalled only 2,292 – just 0.16 per cent.
Mercury’s move marks a symbolic end to the days of music fans heading to record shops and poring over the cover of their seven-inch single or CD sleeve.
The 45rpm single was first introduced in 1949 and has been produced ever since, although sales have been pummelled first by the rise of the CD and then the supremacy of downloads.
With the drop in demand, singles have been increasingly difficult to buy on the high street. One of the biggest retailers, Woolworths, has already disappeared and struggling music firm HMV has been devoting more and more of its shop space to DVDs.
Despite regular suggestions of the return of vinyl, sales are still tiny and falling.
Figures compiled by the Official Charts Company earlier this year showed they have now hit rock bottom. While total seven-inch sales amounted to more than a million in 2006, that figure was down 85 per cent to just 152,000 last year.
Twelve-inch singles have fared even worse, down from 1.3 million to just 67,000 in four years.
Although overall singles sales have grown hugely each year since 2006, from 66.9 million to 161.8 million, those figures actually include sales of all individually downloaded tracks, in addition to those formally released as “singles”.
Increased manufacturing costs and discounting has meant less money is being made on the formats.
And the cost of dealing with excess stock wiped out any profits which Mercury made on singles.
Ian McCann, the new editor of Record Collector magazine, said: “The major labels have struggled to find a way of coping with the comparatively small runs that a physical single entails and are just not cut out for such business.
“Limited-edition pressings of singles – yes, real records – are still must-have items for fans of indand metal, for example, and I’m addicted to buying DJ-only singles of dance and hip-hop tunes from specialist outlets like Fat City, Juno and Phonica. Some enterprising folks press up certain downloads on 45. The reggae smash Clarks by Vybz Kartel is one example.”
Mr McCann added: “Record collectors collect records. They might play MP3s on their commute, they might like listening to Spotify or Soundcloud, but they want to own something physical that boasts artwork to pore over.
“So while this might look like the death knell for the 45 – and it is more a niche market these days – I think we won’t be burying the physical single yet awhile.”