Back in the Days of Yore, before netbooks and mobile phones and even (shudder) Walkmans, there was the 9-inch vinyl 45 rpm single. On sale in record stores everywhere, 45s were designed by the industry to be a cheaper alternative to buying entire albums, offering consumers a chance to buy just the songs they liked from a particular artist—45s were also huge for jukebox systems, enabling players to pop in a dime (or, later, a quarter!) and set up their own playlists in pizza joints, diners, and bars around the world. One neat things about 45s was that customers essentially got two songs for the price of one: sure, the hit single was on the A-side, but the B-side featured another track from the same artist or label; sometimes the B-side wasn’t anything interesting, but sometimes it was a hidden gem.
