“For much of its two-decade long life, the CD single has existed as the music industry’s latter-day version of the Betamax tape — technologically advanced, high quality — and a commercial flop… The industry is looking to change all that. As of last week, HMV stores around the country started heavily promoting singles in their stores, encouraged, no doubt, by an industry suddenly willing to supply a product it had once been hesitant about… So why the singles pitch? The short answer is crisis, says Brian Robertson, president of CRIA, which has been studying a marked downturn in music sales. File-sharing, music downloading and home CD-burning is bleeding revenue away from the music industry at an alarming rate, he said.”