Whether it was Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock - recorded 50 years ago this week - or the Spice Girls' Wannabe, everybody remembers their first single. Books have been written extolling our emotional attachment to the shiny little things, and the British Hit Singles guide published annually by Guinness is a steady seller.
But while we - those of us over 25, anyway - may consider singles cherished cultural artefacts, it appears that few of us actually buy them any more.
That's the conclusion reached by WH Smith, which last month became the first major CD retailer to stop selling singles. "They used to be one of our main areas of business, but due to a 33% worldwide drop in singles sales and a growing demand for albums and DVDs, we took the decision to stop stocking them," says a spokeswoman for the chain. Though no other shop has yet gone the WH Smith route, it has been interpreted by many in the music business as the thin end of the wedge.
There is no denying that the past few years have been disastrous for the format. In 1997, at the height of Spice and Britpop mania, 87m singles were bought in the UK. Last year, for reasons the industry is still struggling to explain, it was 36m.
In January, they hit their lowest ebb since the 50s, shifting just 400,000 copies in one week. Everyone is pointing a finger at illegal internet downloading, a crushingly dry subject that has the industry in knots. The common perception is that tech-literate teenyboppers are getting their Busted singles free via file-sharing services rather than traipsing down to Smith's. But in fact, according to the legal download company OD2, big chart acts such as Busted account for only 11% of downloads. (No definitive download statistics exist yet, but American companies such as iTunes claim to be selling 1m downloads a month at around 99 cents a track.)
In other words, fans of major acts would still rather cough up £3.99 for a CD in a bricks-and-mortar shop. It's just that fewer of them seem to want to. Which raises a significant point. Consumers have complained for years that, at anything up to £4.99, CD singles are too expensive. That's a substantial proportion of the average Busted kid's pocket money, and with albums currently selling for as little as £8.99, it makes sense to bypass the single and spend the extra few quid on Busted's (quite listenable) album. Gennaro Castaldo, of HMV Records, says: "The effects of downloading are only part of the story. Price, and the way singles are pre-promoted across TV and radio, are far more important factors [in their decline]."
Pre-promotion is the now ubiquitous practice of giving singles airplay up to eight weeks before their official release, creating a pent-up demand that has fans rushing to the shop to buy the song as soon as it comes out. Invariably, it goes to No 1, to be replaced the following week. Common for the last few years, it has affected what Castaldo calls the "integrity" of the chart.
Another factor in shrinking sales is the music on offer. The Pop Idol phenomenon, which made a household name of former BMG Records talent scout Simon Cowell, is coming to be seen as one of the worst things to hit music in years. What seemed like a novel idea - to create a star through televised auditions - has backfired, with audiences realising they're being manipulated to boost record-company profits. The "stars" unearthed by Pop Idol and its BBC rival Fame Academy are fading away almost as soon as they've released a record, as the public decide they can live without another listless cover of a Beatles song. Disaffected fans then go on to boycott other pop acts.It's a lose-lose situation.
In America, the singles market is "almost dead and buried", says Paul Williams, of trade magazine Music Week. Three-quarters of the US top 100 "singles" chart consists of songs that can't be bought in shops. Having deemed it a waste of money to put out actual pieces of plastic, record companies release "featured" or "most requested" tracks to radio. If you like what you hear, you'll have to buy the entire album to get that one track.
When the American chart is compiled each week, the amount of airplay a song has had - rather than shop sales - determines its place in the chart. As for the few singles available to buy, none - even those by Madonna or the Rolling Stones - can expect to sell more than a few thousand copies. All rather grim, if you're the sort of person who melts over memories of black plastic seven-inchers (I can remember what was No 1 the week I moved to London: Culture Club's Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?).
But in Britain, traditionally the biggest per-capita singles market in the world, we are unlikely to lose the format altogether. The single is most people's first introduction to music, and while there are many alternatives to CD - including downloads, the iPod, the expanding ringtones market and a new service that downloads tracks into mobile phones - the music business doesn't want to drop the physical artefact altogether.
James Gillespie, of the Official UK Charts Company, which compiles the top 40 used by Radio 1, predicts: "Physical CDs won't carry on as the dominant format forever. Since November, we've been testing a download chart, and I think that will come to complement the traditional chart. But the industry takes singles seriously, and in the past few weeks there's been an upturn in over-the-counter sales, which is due to there being some exciting new music out there. It's not looking too bad."
· Caroline Sullivan is a Guardian music critic
