One thing I always hated about a CD was how bands would make one or two good songs, then the rest of the CD was filler. So you ended up paying $15 for a CD for a couple songs. I could not care less if they stopped making CDs. It would be cheaper to just provide a FLAC download and you get it instantly instead of waiting three days for Amazon to put it in the mail.
As 71dB stated, that's certainly not always the case but neither was it entirely uncommon either. Also, "good songs" is very much in the eye of the beholder, albums were commonly designed to be listened to in their entirely and therefore songs were often included that were designed to provide a contrast, a musical shape/progression through the album. So, there would typically be several stand-alone songs of higher energy, which could potentially be "single" hits (and suitable for radio play) and several transitional and/or contrasting songs. In other words, albums were commonly designed as albums rather than just a collection of (relatively or entirely) unrelated singles. However, there were consumers who weren't particularly interested in albums, they just wanted the "singles", in much the same way as some people just want excepts of the famous bits of symphonies or operas, rather than the whole opera or symphony.
Of course, who wouldn't want to pick and choose exactly what we want (and don't want), get it instantly AND pay 1,000 times less for it? However there's a flip side to this coin, as there always is when just picking parts of a product and paying massively less for them. The revenue to those who create, make and distribute those products also falls massively and the basic rules of commercial economics dictate that if the revenue is massively lower then the cost of creating, making and distributing those products also has to be massively lower. The amount of time, expertise and resources allocated to creating those products must be very significantly reduced, which results in poorer quality recordings, plus there's little or no financial incentive to take the risk and invest in artist development or experiment with new, different artists or music. It's a sad fact that if they were starting out today, many of history's greatest artists/bands would never get known (beyond a few hundred facebook family/friends) and a significant amount of history's greatest music/recordings would never have been created in the first place! The age of the professional recording artist is now almost dead, it's been replaced by the age of the celebrity/touring artists, who are part-time recording artists in order to provide promotional material for their real income, their celebrity and tours.
G
