Online copyright infringement may well play a role in the declining revenues of the recorded music industry over the last few years, but other, stronger forces are at work. Chief among them: the shift to digital singles, the death of the album, and the rise of streaming. To an industry accustomed to fattening up on album-only CD revenue for two decades, this new world has been tough to accept.

The independent digital music distributor TuneCore reminded us of just how much people prefer singles to albums—and that this preference isn't just reserved for teeny-bop bands on major labels who put out "crap CDs."

TuneCore head Jeff Price released some stats from 2009, and he was upbeat about the state of the business. "There is more music selling by more artists now than at any time in history," he wrote. "Music sales by unit are up, not down (RIAA, IFPI and Nielsen data also state this)."

Unit sales in digital have been growing, in many cases dramatically—but sales have been almost exclusively in singles. When a 99¢ song and a $10 album both count as a "unit," it's easy to see why the revenue situation is changing.

Below is TuneCore's 2009 sales data. Forty percent of all sales were single-track downloads, 57 percent were streams, and a mere 2.3 percent were full albums.

How does this compare to the major labels? After all, TuneCore is still a drop in the bucket compared to the big players (26 million single-track digital downloads in a year compared to 1.1 billion). The situation is actually quite similar; full album digital sales are nearly nonexistent.

People are streaming music, they're buying singles, and they're listening to webcasts ("digital performance royalties" are way up), they're going to concerts, they're buying merchandise—they just aren't buying albums.