Not so long ago, the best way to share music was by making plastic sing.
We scratched music into 7″ oily black discs in hundreds of neat rings. To get it out, you would scrape a tiny sliver of metal along the ridges.
The size of the disc changed the normal length of songs because you could barely fit four minutes of music on one side.
At first, A and B side was just a label to tell you what song was playing.
Then record labels began only to put the song they wanted radios to play on the A-side. For a couple of decades, the ‘B’ became synonymous with bonus; a special place where artists could try something out knowing their label would just shrug and say, “Make it quick.”
That little creative freedom has spawned dozens of unexpected hits.
There were many ‘B-sides’ that were as much of a hit as their flip-side. Sometimes more. I Will Survive and Ice Ice Baby are just two examples of this.
We can’t always know what people will like — even ourselves.
Always listen to the B-side because you might like it even more than the A-side.