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A love affair with alternative & DIY MUSIC
Supporting new Alternative & DIY music — founded by Paddy Kinsella, Manchester, UK.

The lost art of the b-side in a post-lp world

For decades the humble flip side of a seven-inch carried a strange kind of magic. It was where bands hid their strangest ideas, their half-finished jokes, their cover versions recorded in a single take on a Tuesday afternoon. In an era when an LP was an expensive, time-consuming statement, the B-side existed as a pressure valve, a sketchbook, a place where a group could be a little reckless. That space has nearly vanished. The economics of streaming, the collapse of the physical single, and the dominance of the curated playlist have all conspired to push the B-side toward extinction. What remains is mostly nostalgia, scattered across Bandcamp pages and dusty record store bins in Brunswick and Newtown.

Yet the impulse that created the B-side never really disappeared. It just moved. It lives on in the deluxe edition, the limited cassette run, the secret SoundCloud link shared in a Discord server. The question is whether that scattered, ghostly survival counts as continuity, or whether the form itself has been so hollowed out that it can no longer do the cultural work it once did. The answer matters, because the B-side was never really about the music. It was about the relationship between a band and the people who paid attention.

The golden age of the flip side

Walk into a record shop in Fitzroy or Collingwood and you will still find rows of coloured vinyl seven-inches, many of them reissues from the late seventies and eighties. The Smiths, Joy Division, The Cure, and the entire post-punk cohort treated the B-side as a laboratory. Songs like "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" or "The Original Sin" were never meant to be hits. They were meant to be discovered, pored over, taped onto mix cassettes, and debated on BBS forums decades later. The format forced a kind of editorial discipline. You had about four minutes per side, and you had to earn the listener's attention twice.

That constraint produced a particular kind of song. B-sides were often more experimental than the A-side, looser, more revealing of the band's actual taste rather than their commercial instincts. Engineers learned to coax magic out of two-track recordings, and producers learned that a B-side could rescue a single when the A-side underperformed. In Melbourne's inner north, older punks still trade stories of driving to the city on a Saturday just to flip through the new arrivals bin at Missing Link, hoping to find a single where the B-side was better than the hit.

Why the B-side mattered culturally

The B-side was the closest thing popular music had to a public sketchbook. A band would release a single, and the A-side would be the argument, the polished thesis statement. The B-side was the footnote, the aside, the thing the songwriter thought of at three in the morning and committed to tape before the idea could be talked out of them. Listeners who bought the physical object were rewarded with access. They were trusted with material that the label did not think would chart.

That trust was reciprocal. The B-side taught fans how to listen actively. It rewarded repetition, close attention, the willingness to flip the record over and sit with a song that might not announce itself immediately. In an era of algorithmic recommendation, that mode of listening feels almost subversive. The B-side asked the listener to do the work, and the listener who did the work felt like an insider. The culture of the B-side was, in a real sense, a culture of complicity between artist and audience.

The economics of the single

The death of the B-side is fundamentally a story about revenue. When a physical single was the primary way to sell recorded music, the B-side was a necessary part of the package. A seven-inch without a flip side was incomplete, and labels could charge a small premium for the format. Recording a B-side cost time and money, but it also increased the perceived value of the artefact. The mathematics worked. Independent labels in Adelaide and Perth could press a run of five hundred singles and break even, provided the B-side was strong enough to justify the purchase.

Streaming broke that mathematics entirely. A single on Spotify is not a product but a collection of metadata entries. The marginal cost of including a B-side is effectively zero, which sounds like a win for the format, but in practice the algorithmic system privileges volume and velocity. A band that releases a B-side alongside every A-side dilutes their stream counts, spreads their audience across twice as many tracks, and confuses the playlist curators who decide whether a song gets added to Fresh Finds or the Australian Indie Spotify shelf. The B-side has become a liability, and most managers now counsel against it.

Streaming's relentless logic

Triple j still champions new Australian music with ferocious dedication, and community stations like RRR and FBi remain essential tastemakers, but the underlying economy has shifted beneath their feet. The playlist is the new A-side. Being added to New Music Friday or a mood-based algorithmic collection can move a song from obscurity to six-figure streams in a week, and from there to a spot on a festival bill. The B-side has no equivalent pathway. There is no algorithmic shelf for "deep cuts that the songwriter recorded at home and thinks are too weird for the public."

This creates a perverse incentive. Bands that once used the B-side as a space for risk now treat every release as a potential portfolio piece, optimised for playlist consideration. The result is a kind of aesthetic flattening. Songs become shorter, hooks become more aggressive, and the strange, accretive quality that once defined a band's sound gets sanded away in favour of a more reliable product. Anyone who has spent an evening with a bandcamp rabbit hole knows that the strangest, most compelling material is rarely what gets the algorithm's attention.

The vinyl resurgence and its limits

The recent revival of vinyl has not saved the B-side. Pressing a seven-inch is now an expensive proposition, with costs that have climbed steeply since 2020. Many Australian labels, from Bedlam Suckers in Melbourne to Dot Dash in Sydney, have moved to twelve-inch EPs or short LPs as their primary physical format, which technically includes B-sides but treats them as album tracks rather than as supplementary material. The cultural meaning has shifted. A B-side on a streaming platform is a data point. A B-side on a seven-inch was a gift.

Some artists are pushing back. There is a small but dedicated community of Australian musicians pressing limited-edition lathe-cut records and dub cassettes, formats where the B-side still carries the weight of ritual. Bands like Tropical Fuck Storm and The Sweetener have released physical artefacts that treat the B-side as essential rather than incidental. These releases are not commercial propositions. They are gestures, statements of intent, ways of signalling to a small audience that the band still believes in the format. Medieval chant traditions have something to teach us here, because their survival depended on the same kind of devoted, marginal community that keeps the B-side alive today.

The cassette culture keeps it alive

In Brisbane and Hobart, a loose network of small labels and bedroom tape duplicators has emerged around the cassette format. Cassettes are cheap to produce, forgiving of lo-fi recording, and they still have a flip side. A band can record four songs in a living room, press fifty tapes, and sell them at a show at The Barwon Club or the Cambridge Hotel. The B-side is not an afterthought. It is half the point. The medium shapes the message, and the cassette is one of the few remaining formats where the B-side still does its old cultural work.

This is not nostalgia. It is a practical response to the absurdities of the streaming economy. A cassette is not competing with Spotify. It is offering something different. It is offering an object that the listener has to actively engage with, that rewards the kind of close attention the algorithm cannot automate. A faulty amplifier once accidentally defined a scene, and similar accidents of limitation are still producing compelling music in Australian garages and share houses.

A path forward for artists and listeners

There is no going back to 1983. The economic structure that supported the B-side as a commercial format is gone, and it is not coming back. What can be preserved is the spirit of the thing, and that requires conscious effort from both artists and listeners.

  • Treat the B-side as a feature, not a filler. If you are a musician, write the B-side with the same care as the A-side, and resist the temptation to pad it with a quick demo.
  • Release material on formats that have a physical flip side. Lathe-cuts, cassettes, and seven-inches still exist, and the constraint can be generative.
  • Buy the object when you can. Stream the song, but own the artefact. The B-side survives because people are willing to pay for it.
  • Curate your own listening. Build playlists that include deep cuts, and treat the algorithm as a suggestion rather than a prescription.
  • Support community radio and independent press. Stations like RRR and publications like this one still treat music as something worth discussing in depth.
  • Encourage local venues to programme B-side sets. The Tote in Melbourne and the Landsdowne in Sydney have historically supported this kind of bill, and more venues should follow their lead.
  • Remember that the B-side was never about chart position. It was about trust, craft, and the relationship between a band and the people who paid attention.

The B-side is not dead, but it is no longer a default feature of how music reaches the public. It survives in the margins, in the lathe-cut racks of tiny record stores, in the tape collections of musicians who refuse to let the format disappear, and in the listening habits of fans who still believe that flipping a record over is worth the effort. The loss of the B-side is part of a larger loss, the gradual erosion of the spaces where music could be strange, local, and unhurried. The task for the next decade is to keep that strangeness alive, one flip side at a time.