45-rpm Releases from 1990 Onwards

Hykker wrote: Was there any rhyme or reason to which songs were available as 45s in the late 80s/early 90s? Some labels (EMI-distributed labels in particular) discontinued them early on, while other labels were more hit or miss.

You’re right about Capitol-EMI. They cut back aggressively starting summer 1989, and there was very little available from them in 7-inch format until early ’92, when the “for jukeboxes only” series started. Arista, on the other hand, still released pretty well everything on 45 until late ’91, then aggressively cut back. Columbia/Sony and Warner/Atlantic still released most songs on 45 once they became top 40 hits, but there were many cases of lower-charting songs being available on 45 and much higher-charting songs not.

Sometimes labels seemed to keep changing their minds – MCA for example released everything until late ’90, then stopped for a while. They started again in mid-91 and by late ’92 had stopped again. Go figure!