people say that but there are still people out there buying singles. Teenagers are into 7" singles and with any band there's always people out there wanting to hear any extra material there is.
I think it's more accurate to say U2's reign as a great B-sides band is dead. Possibly. This decade has been pretty terrible. There were THREE 'proper' b-sides excluding countless remixes and live tracks out of five singles off the last album, and two of them were covers.
I'm all for them holding back original songs in case they can use them later but come on, if that's what they were doing last time then it wasn't really worth it as most of The Bomb's singles (as a collection of tracks) were pretty bad as a result and we waited 4 1/2 years for another album.
And now it looks like we're not going to get any original B-sides as a result of Songs Of Ascent being a possible home for them, meaning they'll spend longer tweaking and fucking with songs, which they may well end up deciding they can't take any further and could have been used as B-sides earlier on. Then NLOTH's singles will just be another collection of remix/live discs.
I'm all for being proved wrong with the third single though.