The Guardian says youngsters are buying singles even if adults aren't:

Olivia Beaumont marches purposefully around Oxford Circus HMV. Her hand clutches a £20 note. Her brow is furrowed in steely determination. She clearly takes her role in this small social experiment very seriously indeed.
Olivia is nine years old, and she loves pop. These days, troubled music journalists spend a lot of their time clutching their brows in despair and demanding to know who buys all these dreadful, anodyne, manufactured pop singles by Will Young and Atomic Kitten.

Olivia does. She loves Pop Idol and Britney Spears, and - if you don't want to feel as old as Methuselah, look away now - she would "only buy a Robbie Williams record if it was for my mum". Impressed by the ease with which Will and Gareth ascended to superstardom, she even tried to form her own pop band at school with two friends. Tragically, the dread hand of authority intervened: "The teacher said we couldn't just play on our own, and we had to let everybody else join in. We had to let them all be backing dancers and it didn't work."

She is a new breed of record-buyer, who couldn't care less that her tastes are the object of scorn and derision from grumpy rock stars and disgruntled critics all over Britain. Why should she? After all, she's on the winning team, the team whose players are slowly but surely turning the Top 40 into their personal dominion, banishing adult music fans to the fusty environs of the album chart.

I have given her £20, let her loose in HMV and told her to buy what she wants. She heads straight for the singles department, buying Britney Spears, S Club Juniors, Puretone's pop drum'n'bass tune Addicted to Bass and, more bizarrely, Nickelback's How You Remind Me. "You get more for your money," she says. "When I buy albums, sometimes I only like one song. You spend a lot of time skipping things." By contrast, the Guardian's 26-year-old photographer seems bemused. "When was the last time I bought a single?" she says. "I haven't bought one in years."

Neither have many other adults.....

Dear Fred,

You hit the nail on the head a couple of weeks ago when you mentioned singles. I used to buy singles every week, at least $20 worth. But now I never go to the record store. No singles means no business for the record companies from me. I hear all kinds of music on the radio and I like a variety of songs. I have three that I really would buy right now but I'm not about to purchase three CDs by three different artists. That's about $45. If there were three singles it would [cost] much less and I would buy them.

page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4