By Jeanne A. Naujeck
The (Nashville) Tennessean

Did you cry when they phased out the 45 rpm record? Have you noticed that you can't find CD singles? Ever spend $17.99 for an album you played only once?

Many music collectors share your pain. And in 1999, when a college freshman named Shawn Fanning invented software that let people trade tracks online, tens of millions of people downloaded only songs they liked.

People want to choose and organize music their way, and if the future of music is indeed a singles world, smart businesses will find a way to accommodate it and capitalize on it.

"It's the promise of online - stripped down song to song, you can customize every album to taste without paying extra. To fail to recognize that is to deny the thing that makes the medium powerful," said Joe Kraus, co-founder of DigitalConsumer.org, an organization that says it favors fair use for copyrighted material and compensation for those who created it.

The return to single tracks brings the record industry full circle.

For the first 60 years of the 20th century, companies produced discs that spun at 78 revolutions per minute. One song fit on each side.

In 1948, Columbia Records introduced the long-playing record: a 12-inch, vinyl disc that, with a speed of 33.3 rpm, held almost 30 minutes of music per side. The next year, RCA Victor launched the 7-inch, 45 rpm disc. By the mid-1950s, most companies were issuing records on both formats, with the 45 single becoming the primary medium for pop music.

As the rock era advanced, labels treated singles as a marketing tool to sell LPs.

That business model worked for a long time. After consumers became accustomed to paying full price for albums, labels dropped 45s. When compact discs became the dominant format, low-margin CD singles also lost shelf space.

Fed-up consumers struck back through Fanning's Napster and the clones that sprung up after Napster's demise.

The record industry has started its own paid download sites such as Listen.com, Pressplay and MusicNet. For about $10 a month, subscribers can listen to all the music they want and record songs onto CDs or MP3 players for a fee.

But many users and analysts think the sanctioned pay-for-play sites are "pale imitations of what you can get for free," said Brian Zisk, an entrepreneur in digital music technologies.

"They're not giving people a lot of options if they want to buy online," said Gary Overton, general manager of EMI Music Publishing in Nashville, Tenn. "

Record companies have the catalogs. But they've been reluctant to make them available, in part because they don't want to give up a business model that's working.

Peter Strickland, national director of sales and marketing for Warner Bros. Nashville, concedes the record industry made a mistake when it tried to stop singles from cutting into album sales.

"The reaction was to release fewer commercial singles, and at the same time, digital downloading and burning was going on. So it essentially drove people to the Internet."

By offering an array of creative content with master-quality sound, companies could give music lovers a reason to forsake the free sites.

"What our business needs to do is take apart how we do things and then put it back together," Overton said.