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Pop Appeal
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This weeks feature
Memories are made of hits
Noel Coward summed up the unique appeal of the pop single when he spoke of the 'potency of cheap music', and it wasn't so long ago that important moments in people's lives would be evoked by the hit songs of the time.
It's hard to imagine anyone feeling nostalgic for Benny Hills 'Ernie' or Clive Dunn's 'Grandad', but how many people fell in love to 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', or walked down the aisle to 'All You Need Is Love'? And it's not just the first flush of young love that can be recalled by a favourite single - for his funeral, Peter Sellers instructed that 'In The Mood' be played as his coffin was borne towards the altar.
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Pop pomposity popped by punk
The single has been revived at various points in pop history - punk rockers preferred the short sharp shock of the three-minute single to the LP format, which was associated with what they saw as the pompous meanderings of progressive rockers like Emerson Lake and Palmer and Yes. Then there were the manufactured pop songs of the Stock Aitken Waterman stable.
But the decline of the pop single was so acute by the late Eighties that the British Phonographic Industry changed the rules for the award of gold, silver and platinum discs. To qualify for a silver disc, singles had to sell 200,000 copies, down from 250,000, and a gold single had to sell 400,000 copies, down from 500,000. Most tellingly, to qualify for a platinum disc a record had to sell 600,000 copies, down from a million.
One important cause of the decline in singles sales is demographic - teenagers, the target market for the CD single, do not have the economic power they wielded in the Fifties and Sixties. Rather it's the teenagers of that era who are the real power in today's pop market.
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