Sinister: Talking through their b-sides

[Keith Watson]

>I hadn't heard about this new ruling on what constitutes a single.
>
>Are these sort of rulings something that just happens in the UK?
>
>If so then for the benefit of those outside the UK these spurious
>rulings are made by the people who compile our music charts.  Record
>companies then pretty much have to comply if they want their releases
>to get listed in the charts - and most do.
>
>The death knell for vinyl was sounded in the UK when they made a similar
>ruling about the maximum number of formats that could be counted towards
>a single's sales and, if I remember rightly, there was a rule introduced
>around the start of the eighties to stop record companies giving away weird
>and wonderful free gifts with records in order to boost sales.
>
>None of these rules could really be said to have enhanced pop music.
>
>Kevan



Oddly enough, regarding this ruling stuff (hehe) in about 1992 they ruled
(heheheh) that a single could be no longer than 40 minutes in length. The
other day I was listening to the dark and long single by Underworld, which I
haven't listened to for ages, but once it finished the CD player shows how
long the whole single is, and by accident or design, it's 39 minutes 59
seconds - not bad is it.

    Indeed the number of tracks on a single has been reduced from 4 till 3,
however no-one seems to have pointed out that B+S's last single quite
happily got in the charts. NIce trick that. Bit strange as well how you
could easily get around this sort of thing. The Stone Roses' Standing Here
for example, sounds like two separate songs really, could you claim that
your six songs were just sections of the same song? I think we should start
a petition to get Genesis to release "Supper's ready" which is a fuckoff big
multi-parted thingy  (or so my friends tell me ;), just to test the water.


Cheers,
    Keith.


ps : in particular the list rules
    (This is cut and pasted from Paul's web page)

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