I’ll wager the cost of producing, pressing, distributing, and marketing a 45RPM single was not terribly different from the costs of putting out an album. But with an album, you could charge a lot more. To bump up profit, labels would have artists do an album’s worth of songs, shove a few hit singles on it, and force everyone to buy the more expensive album to get the content (the hits) they really want. So the “album” is a contrived framework created more for the convenience and bottomline of the record labels than for the artist.
Some artists took that format to new heights creating wonderful albums that offer an experience greater than the sum of its parts. Everybody has their personal examples: Avalon by Roxy Music, Dazzle Ships by OMD, Secrets of the Beehive by David Sylvian, Mezzanine by Massive Attack, Music Has the Right to Children from Boards of Canada… The list goes on. These works are stronger as a cohesive unit IMHO than as an incomplete collection of singles.
Does that mean someone should be forced to buy them as a complete set?
Before you answer consider that there are a lot more artists who simply concoct filler BS and slap that around one or two hits.
