Who Needs Singles?

April 14, 2005

While perusing the newest issue of Rolling Stone, I happened upon an article about Jack Johnson. I'm not really a fan, but the headline was something like, "Jack Johnson stays in the Top 10 without a single." That piqued my interest. I'm often hearing about records being shelved because it would be hard to market (see: Fiona Apple's situation). It's also fairly common for a label to bring in a new producer to make a record more radio-friendly. Jack Johnson managed to avoid these problems, I assume, release his record and still sell about 450,000 copies.

To me, that's pretty incredible. You can mostly credit his talent and rabid fan-base, but I'm hoping the record labels remember that it's not impossible for an artist to grow organically. Sometimes it would be nice if record execs didn't think that their opinions were constantly in tune with the public at large.

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