Single (music)
type of music release
In music, a single is a type of release of a song recording of fewer tracks than an album (LP). As the name suggests, a single typically contains only a single song, but they can sometimes have two.
A single can be released for sale to the public in a variety of physical or digital formats. Singles may be standalone tracks or connected to an artist's album, and in the latter case would often have at least one single release before the album itself, called lead singles.
The single was defined in the mid-20th century with the 45 (named after its speed in revolutions per minute), a type of 7-inch sized vinyl record containing an A-side and a B-side, i.e. one song on each side. The single format was highly influential in pop music and the early days of rock and roll, and it was the format used for jukeboxes and preferred by younger populations in the 1950s and 1960s.
Singles in digital form became very popular in the 2000s. Distinctions for what makes a single have become more tenuous since the biggest digital music distributor, the iTunes Store, only accepts as singles releases with three tracks or fewer that are less than ten minutes each (with longer releases being classified as EPs or albums). However, releases which do not fit these criteria have been promoted as singles by artists and labels elsewhere, such as on Spotify and the Bandcamp storefront.
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This entry incorporates text from “Single (music)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.