I asked the band the same question and the answer of Brent of PDC is:
"Actually, people are buying less LPs,
because there just aren't enough good tunes to justify it. So they
download the few tunes that they like and go from there. This is the
way it will be for ever now that iTunes sells the most music in the
world.
The problem with releasing one LP is that the industry
will accept only ONE musical genre classification. You have to have one
title that covers it all. If you are wrong, you miss out on sales and
airplay.
What we are doing is multipurposed. We are selling a
rock/prog-rock CD, and a AC/Rock CD. This way the radio people will
look at the disc that has their music, and the rock crowd will only get
the music they like.
As far as itunes goes, if we put out 14
tunes on one disc, they still charge 9.99 for it. If you downloaded
them individually, you would pay $14, so we lose money. So we would
rather offer two EPs with 7 songs each, have them be received by their
two different markets and get paid appropriately.
The number of
tunes is kind of a misnomer here. One of our tunes is closing in on 14
minutes long. That is about half of the average band's CD of 28
minutes. Most of our songs are about 4 minutes long. So, we are giving
a big bang for the buck here."
They forget not
all people buy tunes on iPod.
I prefer it to order CDs instead of MP3's.