How a Flop Single Made Pink Floyd Stop Releasing Standalone Tracks for 15 Years

After the sprawling psychedelic experiment “Point Me at the Sky” failed to chart in 1968, Pink Floyd essentially swore off non-album singles. The song was their last standalone seven-inch until “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” broke the streak in 1979. That’s a 15-year gap—an almost unheard-of strategy for a major rock band.

The band’s reasoning was less about artistic purity and more about bruised commercial expectations. Up to that point, Floyd had released several non-album singles (like “Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play”), but none of them charted well after their debut. The frustration convinced them to treat singles as byproducts of albums rather than separate statements. By the early ‘70s, they’d even stopped issuing singles in the UK entirely for a stretch, letting the albums speak for themselves.

This decision had a huge side effect: it let the band stretch songs out to album length without pressure to produce a hit. “Echoes,” “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” and the entire Dark Side of the Moon suite were never trimmed for radio-friendly edits. The flip side is that casual listeners in the ‘70s often couldn’t discover Pink Floyd through a radio single—they had to buy the whole album or hear it on late-night FM. In a way, the failure of a little-known 1968 B-side helped shape how the band controlled its legacy for over a decade.