10 More Great Rock Music Singles That Never Appeared On An Album
4. Numb/Encore - Linkin Park/Jay-Z
Linkin Park's second album, Meteora, closed with the phenomenonal Numb. The song, which has been streamed over 1 billion times on Spotify, was so good that it caught the attention of rap mogul Jay-Z, who decided that he wanted a piece of the action.
The two parties worked on the EP Collision Course, which bore the single Numb/Encore, a mash-up of the track from Meteora and a song from Jay-Z's Black Album. The entire EP was combined songs, but this was the one that caught fire.
Numb/Encore went three-times Platinum in both the US and UK, proving to be a very solid business decision by both acts. Its success made a lot of sense, as both acts were very popular at the time and Linkin Park's music already had a hip-hop flavour to it.
However, despite being a big seller, neither artist ever opted to put the song on one of their individual records.
As mentioned earlier, Collision Course was an EP, which are not albums. That's not a technicality; they're entirely definitely things. As a result, Numb/Encore is a non-album single.
Apologies if you don't like this one, but those are the rules.