1.
Single (music)
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In music, a single or record single is a type of release, typically a song recording of fewer tracks than an LP record, an album or an EP record. This can be released for sale to the public in a variety of different formats, in most cases, a single is a song that is released separately from an album, although it usually also appears on an album. Typically, these are the songs from albums that are released separately for promotional uses such as digital download or commercial radio airplay and are expected to be the most popular, in other cases a recording released as a single may not appear on an album. As digital downloading and audio streaming have become prevalent, it is often possible for every track on an album to also be available separately. Nevertheless, the concept of a single for an album has been retained as an identification of a heavily promoted or more popular song within an album collection. Despite being referred to as a single, singles can include up to as many as three tracks on them. The biggest digital music distributor, iTunes, accepts as many as three tracks less than ten minutes each as a single, as well as popular music player Spotify also following in this trend. Any more than three tracks on a release or longer than thirty minutes in total running time is either an Extended Play or if over six tracks long. The basic specifications of the single were made in the late 19th century. Gramophone discs were manufactured with a range of speeds and in several sizes. By about 1910, however, the 10-inch,78 rpm shellac disc had become the most commonly used format, the inherent technical limitations of the gramophone disc defined the standard format for commercial recordings in the early 20th century.26 rpm. With these factors applied to the 10-inch format, songwriters and performers increasingly tailored their output to fit the new medium, the breakthrough came with Bob Dylans Like a Rolling Stone. Singles have been issued in various formats, including 7-inch, 10-inch, other, less common, formats include singles on digital compact cassette, DVD, and LD, as well as many non-standard sizes of vinyl disc. Some artist release singles on records, a more common in musical subcultures. The most common form of the single is the 45 or 7-inch. The names are derived from its speed,45 rpm. The 7-inch 45 rpm record was released 31 March 1949 by RCA Victor as a smaller, more durable, the first 45 rpm records were monaural, with recordings on both sides of the disc. As stereo recordings became popular in the 1960s, almost all 45 rpm records were produced in stereo by the early 1970s
2.
The Corrs
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The Corrs are an Irish band that combine pop rock with traditional Irish themes within their music. The group consists of the Corr siblings, Andrea, Sharon, Caroline and they are from Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland. The Corrs have released six albums and numerous singles, which have reached Platinum in many countries. Talk on Corners, their most successful album to date, reached multi-Platinum status in Australia and in the UK it was the highest selling album of 1998. The band is one of only a handful of acts who have held the top two positions simultaneously in the UK album charts, with Talk on Corners at number one and Forgiven, Not Forgotten at number two. The latter was the third highest selling album in Australia in 1996, behind Alanis Morissettes Jagged Little Pill and their third studio album, In Blue, went to number one in seventeen countries. The Corrs have been involved in philanthropic activities. They have performed in charity concerts such as The Princes Trust event in 2004. The same year, they were awarded honorary MBEs for their contributions to music, the band was for almost 10 years inactive because Jim and Caroline were raising families, while Andrea and Sharon were pursuing solo careers while raising families of their own. According to Sharon Corr, it was uncertain if and when The Corrs would reunite and their sixth studio album, White Light, was released on 27 November 2015, and was accompanied by a european tour. The Corrs are from Dundalk, County Louth in Ireland, while Caroline and Andrea were still attending school, Jim and Sharon began playing as a duo, often at their aunts pub, McManuss. In 1990, Jim and Sharon added their younger siblings, to form a quartet and their career took off in 1991 when they auditioned for the film The Commitments. Jim, Sharon and Caroline each had small parts as musicians, john Hughes noticed them when they auditioned for the movie and agreed to become their manager. In 1994, the American ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith, after an appearance at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, United States, The Corrs joined Celine Dions worldwide Falling Into You Around the World Tour as a supporting act. Jason Flom, Atlantic Recordss head of A&R, recommended that they meet David Foster, the Corrs played live for Foster and he agreed to sign them to Atlantic Records. They extended their stay in the US for over five months to record their album, Forgiven. It featured six instrumental selections among its Celtic-influenced tracks, the album sold well in Ireland, Australia, Japan, Norway and Spain. Major success in the US and the UK, however, was not immediately forthcoming, eventually, the album reached Platinum status in the UK and Australia, and 4× Platinum in Ireland, making it one of the most successful debuts by an Irish group
3.
Talk on Corners
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Talk on Corners is the second studio album by Irish pop rock band The Corrs. It was released on 24 October 1997 in Ireland and on 5 May 1998 in the United States by 143, Lava and its commercial performance elsewhere was initially modest, however. This event did much to raise the international profile. A remixed version of Dreams went on to become their first top ten hit on the UK Singles Chart, the record was reissued the following month to include the song as a bonus track. This would be the first of several different editions of Talk on Corners to be released over the albums two year-long promotional cycle. Over this period, the released a string of increasingly successful hit singles. The Corrs also toured extensively to promote the record, the Talk on Corners World Tour saw them perform almost 160 concerts across twelve separate legs, the album spent ten weeks at number one in the UK. It ended 1998 as the album of the year, and remains one of the best-selling albums of all time there. The Corrs began work on new material in California in July 1996, the label disliked What Can I Do and So Young, particularly the latter, and the band had to fight hard for their inclusion on the album. Additional co-writers and producers were brought in to improve the albums hit potential, including Carole Bayer Sager, Glen Ballard, Oliver Leiber, Rick Nowels. In May 1997, the album was delivered to Atlantic. When they refused, the label threatened to sue the band for breach of contract, Talk on Corners is predominantly a pop rock album, although it also incorporates elements of Celtic and traditional Irish music. Intimacy was co-written by Billy Steinberg, the writer of hit singles including Madonnas Like a Virgin and their cover of the Jimi Hendrix song Little Wing features Irish folk collective The Chieftains. The albums title is derived from a lyric in the song Queen of Hollywood, the record received generally positive reviews from music critics. She highlighted their cover of Little Wing as being the albums best and most spirited Celtic cut, stephen Segerman of South African music magazine Rock rated the album eight out of ten, and complimented it for incorporating a fuller and rockier atmosphere. He also praised the record for containing generous sprinklings of traditional Irish sounds and touches, the special edition of the album received mixed reviews from the American music press. Her lead vocals are as pretty to listen to as she and her sisters are to look at, british rock magazine NME have retrospectively been highly critical of the album, placing it at number three in their 2014 list of 25 unfathomably popular albums of the 90s. The album also appeared in a 2016 article titled 8 of the all-time best-selling albums in the UK have no redeeming features whatsoever, the original edition of the album was released internationally from October 1997, and was an immediate commercial success in several territories
4.
A-side and B-side
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The terms A-side and B-side refer to the two sides of 78,45, and 33 1/3 rpm phonograph records, whether singles, extended plays, or long-playing records. Creedence Clearwater Revival had hits with both A-side and B-side releases, others took the opposite approach, producer Phil Spector was in the habit of filling B-sides with on-the-spot instrumentals that no one would confuse with the A-side. With this practice, Spector was assured that airplay was focused on the side he wanted to be the hit side, the earliest 10-inch,78 rpm, shellac records were single sided. Double-sided recordings, with one song on side, were introduced in Europe by Columbia Records. There were no record charts until the 1930s, and radio stations did not play recorded music until the 1950s, in this time, A-sides and B-sides existed, but neither side was considered more important, the side did not convey anything about the content of the record. The term single came into use with the advent of vinyl records in the early 1950s. At first, most record labels would randomly assign which song would be an A-side, under this random system, many artists had so-called double-sided hits, where both songs on a record made one of the national sales charts, or would be featured on jukeboxes in public places. As time wore on, however, the convention for assigning songs to sides of the record changed. By the early sixties, the song on the A-side was the song that the company wanted radio stations to play. It was not until 1968, for instance, that the production of albums on a unit basis finally surpassed that of singles in the United Kingdom. In the late 1960s stereo versions of pop and rock songs began to appear on 45s. The majority of the 45s were played on AM radio stations, by the early 1970s, double-sided hits had become rare. Album sales had increased, and B-sides had become the side of the record where non-album, non-radio-friendly, with the advent of cassette and compact disc singles in the late 1980s, the A-side/B-side differentiation became much less meaningful. With the decline of cassette singles in the 1990s, the A-side/B-side dichotomy became virtually extinct, as the dominant medium. However, the term B-side is still used to refer to the tracks or coupling tracks on a CD single. With the advent of downloading music via the Internet, sales of CD singles and other media have declined. B-side songs may be released on the record as a single to provide extra value for money. There are several types of material released in this way, including a different version, or, in a concept record
5.
CD single
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This article is about the 12cm single. Not to be confused with 8cm single, the standard in the Red Book for the term CD single. A CD single is a single in the form of a standard size compact disc. It is not to be confused with the Mini CD single, the format was introduced in the mid-1980s but did not gain its place in the market until the early 1990s. With the rise in digital downloads in the early 2010s, sales of CD singles have decreased, commercially released CD singles can vary in length from two songs up to six songs like an EP. Some contain multiple mixes of one or more songs, in the tradition of 12 vinyl singles, depending on the nation, there may be limits on the number of songs and total length for sales to count in singles charts. Containing four tracks, it had a limited print run. CD singles were first made eligible for the UK Singles Chart in 1987, the Mini CD single format was originally created for use for singles in the late 1980s, but met with limited success, particularly in the US. The smaller CDs were more successful in Japan and have become more common in Europe. By 1989, the CD3 was in decline in the US and it was common in the 1990s for US record companies to release both a two-track CD and a multi-track maxi CD. In the UK, record companies would also release two CDs but, usually, these consisted of three tracks or more each. Pressure from record labels made singles charts in some countries become song charts, allowing album cuts to chart based only on airplay, without a single ever being released. At the end of the 1990s, the CD was the single format in the UK, but in the US. In Australia, the Herald Sun reported the CD single is set to become extinct, while CD singles no longer maintain their own section of the store, copies are still distributed but placed with the artists albums. That is predominantly the case for popular Australian artists such as Jessica Mauboy, Kylie Minogue and, most recently, Delta Goodrem, the ARIA Singles Chart are now predominantly compiled from legal downloads, and ARIA also stopped compiling their physical singles sales chart. On a Mission by Gabriella Cilmi was the last CD single to be stocked in Kmart, Target and Big W, sanity Entertainment, having resisted the decline for longer than the other major outlets, has also ceased selling CD singles. In Greece and Cyprus, the term CD single is used to describe a play in which there may be anywhere from three to six different tracks. These releases charted on the Greek Singles Chart with songs released as singles, in September 2003, there was talk of ringtones for mobile phones outstripping CD singles sales for the year 2004
6.
Alternative rock
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Alternative rock is a genre of rock music that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1980s and became widely popular in the 1990s and 2000s. In this instance, the word refers to the genres distinction from mainstream rock music. The terms original meaning was broader, referring to a generation of musicians unified by their debt to either the musical style or simply the independent. Ethos of punk rock, which in the late 1970s laid the groundwork for alternative music, Alternative rock is a broad umbrella term consisting of music that differs greatly in terms of its sound, its social context, and its regional roots. Most of these subgenres had achieved minor mainstream notice and a few bands representing them, such as Hüsker Dü, with the breakthrough of Nirvana and the popularity of the grunge and Britpop movements in the 1990s, alternative rock entered the musical mainstream and many alternative bands became successful. By the end of the decade, alternative rocks mainstream prominence declined due to a number of events that caused grunge and Britpop to fade, emo attracted attention in the larger alternative rock world, and the term was applied to a variety of artists, including multi-platinum acts. Post-punk revival artists such as Modest Mouse and The Killers had commercial success in the early, before the term alternative rock came into common usage around 1990, the sort of music to which it refers was known by a variety of terms. In 1979, Terry Tolkin used the term Alternative Music to describe the groups he was writing about, in 1979 Dallas radio station KZEW had a late night new wave show entitled Rock and Roll Alternative. College rock was used in the United States to describe the music during the 1980s due to its links to the radio circuit. In the United Kingdom, dozens of small do it yourself record labels emerged as a result of the punk subculture, according to the founder of one of these labels, Cherry Red, NME and Sounds magazines published charts based on small record stores called Alternative Charts. The first national chart based on distribution called the Indie Chart was published in January 1980, at the time, the term indie was used literally to describe independently distributed records. By 1985, indie had come to mean a particular genre, or group of subgenres, at first the term referred to intentionally non–mainstream rock acts that were not influenced by heavy metal ballads, rarefied new wave and high-energy dance anthems. The use of alternative gained further exposure due to the success of Lollapalooza, for which festival founder, in the late 1990s, the definition again became more specific. Defining music as alternative is often difficult because of two conflicting applications of the word, the name alternative rock essentially serves as an umbrella term for underground music that has emerged in the wake of punk rock since the mid-1980s. Alternative bands during the 1980s generally played in clubs, recorded for indie labels. Sounds range from the gloomy soundscapes of gothic rock to the guitars of indie pop to the dirty guitars of grunge to the 1960s/1970s revivalism of Britpop. This approach to lyrics developed as a reflection of the social and economic strains in the United States and United Kingdom of the 1980s, by 1984, a majority of groups signed to independent record labels mined from a variety of rock and particularly 1960s rock influences. This represented a break from the futuristic, hyper-rational post-punk years
7.
Celtic music
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Celtic music is a broad grouping of music genres that evolved out of the folk music traditions of the Celtic people of Western Europe. It refers to both orally-transmitted traditional music and recorded music and the styles vary considerably to include everything from music to a wide range of hybrids. Celtic music means two things mainly, first, it is the music of the peoples identifying themselves as Celts. Secondly, it refers to whatever qualities may be unique to the musics of the Celtic Nations, many notable Celtic musicians such as Alan Stivell and Paddy Moloney claim that the different Celtic musics have much in common. These common melodic practices may be used widely across Celtic Music, It is common for the line to move up. There are a number of reasons for this, Melodic variation can be easily introduced. Melodic variation is used in Celtic music, especially by the pipes. The relatively wider tonal intervals in some songs make it possible for stress accents within the line to be more in keeping with the local Celtic accent. By more than one Celtic language population belonging to different Celtic groups and these two latter usage patterns may simply be remnants of formerly widespread melodic practices. The definition is complicated by the fact that Irish independence has allowed Ireland to promote Celtic music as a specifically Irish product. However, these are modern geographical references to a people who share a common Celtic ancestry and consequently, additionally, the musics of ethnically Celtic peoples abroad are vibrant, especially in Canada and the United States. In Canada the provinces of Atlantic Canada are known for being a home of Celtic music, most notably on the islands of Newfoundland, Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island. The traditional music of Atlantic Canada is heavily influenced by the Irish, Scottish, in some parts of Atlantic Canada, such as Newfoundland, Celtic music is as or more popular than in the old country. Much of the music of this region is Celtic in nature, in Celtic Music, A Complete Guide, June Skinner Sawyers acknowledges six Celtic nationalities divided into two groups according to their linguistic heritage. The Q-Celtic nationalities are the Irish, Scottish and Manx peoples, while the P-Celtic groups are the Cornish, Bretons, there is also tremendous variation between Celtic regions. Ireland, Scotland, Brittany and Wales have living traditions of language and music, and there has been a recent major revival of interest in Celtic heritage in Cornwall, Galicia has a Celtic language revival movement to revive the Q-Celtic Gallaic language used into Roman times. Most of the Iberian Peninsula had a similar Celtic language in pre-Roman times, a Brythonic language was used in parts of Galicia and Asturias into early Medieval times brought by Britons fleeing the Anglo-Saxon invasions via Brittany. The Romance language currently spoken in Galicia, Galician is closely related to the Portuguese language used mainly in Brazil, Galician music is claimed to be Celtic
