Your frame of reference is too narrow. Armstrong's Muskrat Ramble was a single and it changed the world of music. Hank Williams' Six More Miles To The Graveyard or Billie Holliday's Strange Fruit are anything but fluff. Elvis was heard more on singles in his prime than on LPs. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller... even Enrico Caruso and Stokowski and the Philadelphians became famous based on their singles. The early Beatles records were largely just groups of singles packaged together, and the order of the songs was dictated by what singles were available In the US and which were available in the UK.
The "concept album" didn't exist until Frank Sinatra's Songs For Swinging Lovers. By that time there had already been half a century of recorded music... all on singles. Even long after Sinatra, many forms of music, primarily those aimed at radio (Do Wop, Rock n Roll, Pop Music, Ethnic, Country Western, etc) were based on the single, not the LP. It wasn't until the 70s when singles began to fall out of favor.
You are assuming that all recorded music is like the small amount of music that you're familiar with.
Edited by bigshot - 12/21/10 at 6:58pm
