Quote:
Originally Posted by Macfan4life
Since the album was on the charts for a year maybe they feared Fleetwood Mac burn out from radio stations?
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I think that’s exactly what Warner Bros. was trying to avoid. Billboard ran a lot of business articles about Mac that year and the next and included a bunch of quotes from both label guys and radio guys. They were all trying to avoid “saturating the market.” The talk was that “Second Hand News” was going to be a fifth single. But in the seventies, I guess four singles from a single-disc studio album was just about the max. I don’t think even the Beatles ever released five singles. (
Hotel California only had three official singles.) Plus, in Mac’s case — and I can vouch for this in Southern CA radio markets — all the singles were still in pretty heavy rotation for two years, so the suits may have felt that there was no business need to push a fifth, which would involve marketing and sales expense. An album that spends 31 weeks at no. 1 is sui generis — it’s raking in millions
without having to spend any more money on it. So why spend? Why buy display ads? Why pay radio stations to play what they’re already playing? Why manufacture another 45?