Daruis us right whether we like it or not.

Why the single has seen such a resurgence:

1. Short attention spans of the current generation of listeners. They are mentally incapable of listening to an entire album. They have far too much talking on the cellphone to do to listen to a whole CD.

2. The proliferation of "iTunes" type companies that base their sales on singles rather than albums.

2b. The whole mp3/online road that music took via napster also favored the single, just for bandwidth reasons alone. A chicken/egg argument could be made here, but I see it that iTunes' design and the nature of mp3 favors the single, so singles look hot and that makes singles hot by default.

I suspect that it will swing back the other way as artists and listeners realize that basing everything on the single format is extremely limiting when looking for a piece that gives total immersion, a place to go for more than 3:15.

AFAIC, the music scene today is just like the early 60s before the Beatles. Lots of parallels to the early 70s too. Vapid singers and prefab studio "bands" pukeing up innocuous pop dreck is what's moving the big numbers. It feeds on itself.

It WILL change again. Doesn't it just FEEL like there is a new thing in music that's gonna break huge in the next year or 3? A sea-change, like The Beatles or Punk; something to shake the whole thing to it's foundations.