Pursuant to THIS THREAD. How many of these can you think of. Number one is: She Loves You Yeah, yeah,yeah. Never was on an album until the Red and Blue album collections in the 80s. Ya see, that remains my all-time, nothing comes close, Beatles song. And I got to hear it so little through the years. Only on radio. Cuz it was a single.
Well, back in those early days, between record recording standard of the UK and an agreement between George Martin and Brian Epstein (neither of whom had any experience producing/managing/marketing pop groups), they decided it would be cheating the fans to make them pay for a song on a single and then making them pay for it again on an LP.
Between the UK no singles on an LP thing and the UK practice of 14 songs on an LP vs the US 10/11 song LPs, you’ve got your reason why there were more Beatle LPs released by Capitol in the US than Parlophone in the UK.
Except that was SOP in the UK at the time. UK Record buyers didn’t like it if you put a song on two different media (single, EP, or LP) and being forced to buy it twice. None of the Rolling Stones first singles appeared on UK albums at the time; “Not Fade Away” was on the US version of their first, but not the UK version.
Also you need to remember that it wasn’t until the mid to late 60’s that buying albums became the norm. When rock took off in the 50’s, aimed exclusively towards teenagers, it was the inexpensive 45’s which is what consumers bought.
The growth of the musicians, going from simply serving up catchy tunes for teens to creating more complicated songs, concept albums (Beatles, Beach Boys, Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, etc…) and couple that with the growth of FM radio, well, albums became the way to go.
Plenty of hit singles in the 60s didn’t appear on regular studio albums, but only surfaced on compilation LPs, sometimes years later. Several other obvious examples from the Beatles are “Paperback Writer”, “Rain”, “Lady Madonna”, “Hey Jude”, and “Don’t Let Me Down”. I believe the Stones’ “19th Nervous Breakdown” appeared only on the Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) compilation.
Then you have the B-sides that were good enough to be album cuts. One example I can think of at the moment is the Byrds’ gorgeous “She Don’t Care About Time”, the B-side of “Turn! Turn! Turn!”.
When the Beatles albums were eventually released on CD, they also released two “Past Masters” discs collecting all their songs that didn’t appear on any of the albums (singles, B-sides, rarities).