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In Jackson's heyday, music labels came up with a solution to that whole "People only pay for good music" problem, and the idea of selling singles was phased out. Oh, a few were available if you knew where to look, but not as a staple of the market like in the 1940s through the '70s. No, if you heard a song you liked, you bought the whole damn album, and it usually cost you between $15 and $20 -- hence people bought the album Thriller instead of the seven top 10 singles released from that collection. But there was obviously a problem with that: With the exception of a rare few classic albums (Thriller included), that one song you liked would turn out to be the only good one on the entire LP. It got to the point that you'd walk into a record store and notice that all the customers had a distinct "Don't drop the soap" look on their faces.

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"Dude ... do not go into the Ramones section."

Ironically, our advances in technology have brought us back 70 years into the golden age of music marketing. Through digital downloading, we're no longer being held hostage by that type of bullshit "buy in bulk" sales tactic. And since we now buy most of our music one song at a time, the artists are once again held to a higher standard. If they want to make their $20 for an album, and we're already paying $1 per song, then all 20 of their songs had better be good. We'll gladly pay for them if they're worth buying. But now we get to cherry-pick the good stuff and tell them to pack the filler tightly back into the assholes in which they originated.