#31 - Why we no longer sell single song downloads

We are often asked why we don't sell single song downloads from our Blue Coast Music webstore.  Yes, at Downloads NOW! (our older site) we used to sell single songs so why did we stop?

The reason is pretty simple...  the expense to create vs the number of purchases doesn't make sense...  even more so in the days of streaming.  Imagine a 10 song album and for each album you needed to create that one album into 8 formats for download.  (3 DSD, 3 WAV, 2 FLAC). If there are 10 songs on an album, we would create 4 formats, each requiring a unique skew or ID.  That's a total of 48 skews per album to manage, create metadata for, upload and store in the cloud.  Yes, it's true many stores only created one format for a song -- and those were usually mp3s.

Inevitably, a customer would want to buy the one format we didn't sell in singles.  If we did all 8 formats, we would have 88 skews for each title.  With a 100 albums, that's 8800 skews to manage.  Add another zero and imagine the complications. 

While the world seemed to be gravitating to single songs over album purchases, our audiophile customers were not.  Single only comprised 5% or so of our sales and based on the bank fees, were often a losing proposition.  Even to offer the multiple formats for singles was a website developers nightmare.

When we started the new store at Blue Coast Music, we decided to eliminate singles except for test songs and special event singles with multiple formats to download at once.  While the free test songs to compare formats on your systems excited our customers, the purchase of one single in multiple formats did not.  Streaming on HD audio sites like Qobuz became more popular.  We have many of our Blue Coast Records titles there and one could buy single songs in FLAC or stream.  Late in 2019 we decided not to sell singles at all and focus on albums.

We believe there is still a reason to buy downloads and buy albums.  Albums tell a story of a period of time in an artist's life.  The choice of songs or their sonic arrangements create an environment that lets the listener experience an hour of being with the creative tone that was set.  It's a time to dream.