What a first single records

Katy Perry has three firsts. Her debut album, Katy Hudson, came out in March 2001 on a small Christian label and sold between 100 and 200 copies before the label went bankrupt.¹ Her debut EP, Ur So Gay, came out on Capitol in November 2007.² Her debut single, "I Kissed a Girl," came out in April 2008 as the lead single of her second studio album.³ The same reference work calls all three of them debuts.¹²³

So which is her first single? The answer the record gives is the one that worked. That turns out to be the most interesting thing about first singles.

The bet

The question behind this piece is narrower than it looks. Its working title was "first singles on initial albums and EPs": the song chosen to introduce an artist's first record. The idea is that this choice is made with less information than any later one. Nobody yet knows how listeners will take the artist. Whoever chooses has to fall back on what they already believe.

That makes the first single a dated bet. It was placed at a known moment, by somebody, with money behind it, before the market answered. Every later single is chosen with more evidence: what charted, what got played, what crowds sang back.

If that is right, a first single should preserve something later releases cannot: the beliefs of the people who chose it, at a date, before those beliefs were corrected.

Who placed it, and on what

In the cases where the reasons were recorded, they point less at who the artist is than at where the song can go.

In August 1972 Columbia's president, Clive Davis, heard the album Bruce Springsteen had delivered and rejected it because he felt it lacked a potential hit single. Springsteen wrote "Blinded by the Light" and "Spirit in the Night" to order and recorded them in September. Both were released as singles in 1973. Neither charted.⁴

When Capitol was preparing "I Kissed a Girl," its A&R man, Chris Anokute, later recalled the internal objection: "This is never going to get played on the radio. How do we sell this? How's this going to be played in the Bible Belt?"³ When EMI released Radiohead's "Creep" in September 1992, BBC Radio 1 found it "too depressing" and left it off its playlists. It reached number 78.⁵

Each of these is at least as much a judgment about a slot as about an artist: a format, a playlist, a region. That fits the logic of choosing blind. A song that cannot be filed cannot be programmed, so the first bet tends to be a bet on a category. The first single may tell you more about the map the choosers carried than about the person they were trying to place on it.

And the chooser is often not the artist. Radiohead had not planned to release "Creep." Their producers, Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, asked them to play it between takes of other songs, and Kolderie phoned EMI and talked the label into making it the single.⁵ The band's first public identity was picked by someone else in the room.

The word "first"

Here the idea runs into the record, and the record turns out to be the more interesting part.

By the definition this piece started with, Radiohead's first single would come off Drill, the EP they released in May 1992. It reached number 101.⁶ The record calls "Creep," four months later, their debut single.⁵ Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" is described as his "debut mainstream single," and it appears on his second EP.⁷ Katy Perry's debut single sits on her second album.³

In each case, "debut" is attached not to the first public bet but to the bet that eventually won, or to the start of the version of the artist that lasted. "Creep" did not win at first. It won a year later, and the name followed it back. The earlier releases are not hidden. They are listed, dated and described. They are simply not counted as the beginning.

This is one reference work's usage. Whether labels, charts and critics count beginnings the same way is not shown here, though the qualifier "debut mainstream single" suggests editors felt the strain.

It matters for the original idea. If the first single is valuable because it was chosen before the market answered, then the release later called the first single is often the wrong object to study. It may have been chosen after one answer had already come back, and it is remembered because a later answer was yes.

The alludio.music standards set out a similar limit for a sealed CD: a retailer sticker date "bounds when the sticker was applied, not when the disc was manufactured."⁸ "Debut single" behaves like that sticker. It records when and how a career was filed, not when it began.

The strongest objection

The objection that could sink all of this is that a first single carries no special information at all.

Artists rarely arrive without feedback. Radiohead had formed in 1985 and made demo tapes before Drill.⁶ Katy Perry had made an album and toured it, as an opening act and then on dozens of solo dates, years before "I Kissed a Girl."¹ A first single may simply be whatever was ready, or whatever a producer liked that week. "Creep" was recorded almost by accident; the band did not know the tape was running.⁵

And every case anyone writes about is a winner. The first singles of artists who never had a second are not written up anywhere this piece could find. That is the control group the idea needs, and nobody keeps it. Any pattern drawn from famous debuts is drawn from careers that later gave the debut its meaning.

This objection is real, and it narrows the claim. It does not let anyone say a first single reveals an artist's true self. That was never the strong version.

What survives

Two things survive the collision.

First, the bet is real even when the song was an accident. Somebody still decided to put money behind that song, in that format, on that date, and the reasons on record are about categories. That makes first singles a dated record of what the industry thought a newcomer had to fit, which is useful history whether or not it says anything true about the artist.

Second, a bet that wins has momentum. "Creep" was reissued in 1993 under pressure from the music press, EMI and fans, and reached number seven. EMI then wanted a single "even better" than "Creep." The band wrote "My Iron Lung" in reply, and Thom Yorke said in 1995: "People have defined our emotional range with that one song."⁵ They stopped playing it for years.⁵ A first single does not just record an identity. It can impose one that the artist then has to argue with.

"Old Town Road" shows the bet placed from the other side. It was released independently in December 2018, caught on through TikTok, reached number 19 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart, and was then disqualified on the grounds that it did not fit the genre. It went on to spend a record 19 consecutive weeks at number one on the Hot 100.⁷ A competing artist's manager suggested to Rolling Stone that Lil Nas X had listed it as country to make the charts easier to climb.⁷ That is one person's guess, not a fact about his intent. Either way, here the artist placed the category bet, and the institution refused it.

An open edge

The useful thing to build would be a table with two columns for each artist. In the first, the lead single of the first album or EP, by the author's definition. In the second, the song the record later calls the debut single. Where they match, the first bet won. Where they differ, the gap measures how much the market rewrote the artist before anyone started counting.

"Old Town Road" was first an upload, made over a beat bought online for $30, released the day it was recorded.⁷ The gap has probably grown since labels stopped being the first to choose. When audiences can pick songs before labels do, the official first single becomes a ratification of something already chosen, and the real bet moves earlier, to an upload. If so, the first single as this piece imagined it, a choice made before the market spoke, has not disappeared. It is filed under a release nobody counts.