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The terms A-side and B-side refer to the two sides of 78 and 45 rpm Phonograph Records, whether singles or extended plays (EPs). The A-side usually featured the recording that the artist, record producer, or the record company intended to receive the initial promotional effort and then receive radio airplay, hopefully, to become a "hit" record. The B-side (or "flip-side") is a secondary recording that has a history of its own: some artists, notably Elvis Presley, Little Richard, the Beatles, Chuck Berry, and Oasis, released B-sides that were considered as strong as the A-side and became hits in their own right. Creedence Clearwater Revival had hits, usually unintentionally, with both the B-sides of their A-side releases. Others took the opposite track: producer Phil Spector was in the habit of filling B-sides with on-the-spot instrumentals that no one would confuse with the A-side. With this practice, Spector was assured that airplay was focused on the side he wanted to be the hit side. Music recordings have moved away from records onto other formats such as CDs and digital downloads, which do not have "sides", but the terms are still used to describe the type of content, with B-side sometimes standing for "bonus" track. == History == The earliest 10-inch, 78 rpm, shellac records were single sided. Double-sided recordings, with one song on each side, were introduced in Europe by Columbia Records and by the late 1910s they had become the norm in both Europe and the United States. There were no record charts until the 1930s, and radio stations (by and large) did not play recorded music until the 1950s (when top 40 radio overtook full-service network radio). In this time, A-sides and B-sides existed, but neither side was considered more important; the "side" did not convey anything about the content of the record. In 1948, Columbia Records introduced the 10- and 12-inch long-playing (LP) vinyl record for commercial sales, and its rival RCA-Victor, in cooperation of the Radio Corporation of America, responded the next year with the seven-inch 45 rpm vinyl record, which would come to replace the 78 as the home of the single. The term "single" came into popular use with the advent of vinyl records in the early 1950s. At first, most record labels would randomly assign which song would be an A-side and which would be a B-side. (All records have specific identifiers for each side in addition to the catalog number for the record itself; the "A" side would typically be assigned a sequentially lower number.) Under this random system, many artists had so-called "double-sided hits", where both songs on a record made one of the national sales charts (in ''Billboard'', ''Cashbox'', or other magazines), or would be featured on jukeboxes in public places. As time wore on, however, the convention for assigning songs to sides of the record changed. By the early sixties, the song on the A-side was the song that the record company wanted radio stations to play, as 45 records (or '45s') dominated the market in terms of cash sales. It was not until 1968, for instance, that the total production of albums on a unit basis finally surpassed that of singles in the United Kingdom.〔MacDonald, p. 296〕 By the early 1970s, double-sided hits had become rare. Album sales had increased, and B-sides had become the side of the record where non-album, non-radio-friendly, instrumental versions or simply inferior recordings were placed. With the advent of cassette and compact disc singles in the late 1980s, the A-side/B-side differentiation became much less meaningful. At first, cassette singles would often have one song on each side of the cassette, matching the arrangement of vinyl records, but eventually, cassette maxi-singles, containing more than two songs, became more popular. With the decline of cassette singles in the 1990s, the A-side/B-side dichotomy became virtually extinct, as the remaining dominant medium, the compact disc, lacked an equivalent physical distinction. However, the term "B-side" is still used to refer to the "bonus" tracks or "coupling" tracks on a CD single. With the advent of downloading music via the Internet, sales of CD singles and other physical media have declined, and the term "B-side" is now less commonly used. Songs that were not part of an artist's collection of albums are made available through the same downloadable catalogs as tracks from their albums, and are usually referred to as "unreleased", "bonus", "non-album", "rare", "outtakes" or "exclusive" tracks, the latter in the case of a song being available solely from a certain provider of music. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「A-side and B-side」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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