Member Since: 8/3/2012
Posts: 4,549
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Because the album was a thing of the physical age economics.
When prices were determined per item produced (the discs, booklet, case,...), distributing it to shops (middlemen wants some profit too) and shop profit for each item sold (They used to buy an album for 10 euro and sell it for 20 euro. If they don't get enough profit for each item sold, they are wasting their time on trying to sell it.).
When you spent on 3 to 4 singles (5 euro) the same amount of money as buying the album (15 to 20 euro).
In the digital age, it's almost for free to transfer some bits/bytes to the customer. iTunes takes a tiny piece of the pie because Apple wants to promote their file format to keep iPod, iPhone,... popular (Microsoft tried to push their .wma .wmv). The price depends mainly on what the label wants. There is no reason (in terms of costs) why a single shouldn't be price of an album divided by the amount of tracks.
When you want 3 to 4 singles now, you can buy the songs you want and you spent less on it than on the album.
Flat free streaming is the next stage, a fix fee a month and you can listen to almost any artist without buying their songs/album.
I see albums as merchandising for the fans and older generation. You buy it like a T-shirt, tour program,...
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The sales are really declining. Last year the 2013 Best selling Xmas album sold in 2 months at least 60k more than everyone else but Frozen in 2014 in 6 months. 
