Albums that are Too Short (NOT Too $hort)

I agree. I can only digest so many 2-3 minute songs in one sitting, and if you tend towards looooong songs I'm much more likely to make it through an album if you chop it in half.

1. Nothing; they're free.
2. Some of them are:

albums i kinda like so far this year, alphabetized

(but even the vast majority of THOSE ones are too long.)

I agree that this is currently harder than it should be. I see a couple of possible solutions:

(1) If you have a CD burner, then order the playlist however you would like, and then burn a copy of just the songs you like. Play this instead of the original CD.

(2) Someone should really invent a CD player that remembers what your favorite songs are on each CD. This shouldn't be too hard. Somehow your computer is able to download the title and songlist when you pop a music CD in it, so it shouldn't be that difficult to have a CD player that would remember your favorite songs.

Isn't that doing the artists' work FOR them?

If I was going to get all old-school-ILM on your ass, I would say that comment reeks of rockism ;-) The whole concept of the album as the irreducible unit of artistic achievement is a fairly recent development in the history of music, which is more of an artifact of evolving music playback technologies than anything essential to the act of listening. Witness the new Apple I-Tunes thingy. We are entering a brave new world of music commodification - a world in which the Song is triumphant, the Album is put out to pasture, and selection of song order is no longer considered part of the artist's job.

Too short: Histoire de Melody Nelson

what are these cee-dee's you kids are talking about?

I think Paris 1919 is WAY too short.

Agree that most complaints would be of Cds being too long rather than short. Prince's Dirty Mind is only 30 minutes long but is all the more perfect for that. It's one of my fave things about it so although more music of the same quality might seem like a good thing, in reality it would spoil the record.

The same sorta thing occured earlier in the last century when the LP format switched and allowed artists to record songs more than 3+ minutes long...part of the bebop thing was supposedly about utilizing the new options of vinyl to break from the 3+ minute song format, which was the standard at the time in all styles, country, jazz, etc.

There shouldn't be any need to have to type in a number, since there's a code on each CD that uniquely identifies it (this is how your computer can automatically download the title, songlist, etc. when you pop a music CD in). Also, the 200 CD limit seems rather skimpy. But it sounds like that is an early version of what I was imagining.

Well, I always thought that albums were just a bunch of individual songs, anyway; never bought that "concept" horseshit. And actually, some of the best albums have song-order determined by evil record companies anyway. Like, you, know, K-Tel! And I've made mix tapes and listened to the radio and put songs in jukeboxes and bought singles and cheesy sampler compilations and soundtracks for years (and singles have ALWAYS mattered more than albums), so the "brave new world" stuff is just silly dogma instituted by suckers for expensive technology. Which is to say NOTHING HAS CHANGED. But that doesn't mean that sometimes music doesn't come good in half-hour doses where somebody other than me determines what the doses are. And an hour worth of crap is hard to sift through either way; if the album is over, why not just get rid of albums completely? Doubt I'd complain much. Also, I DON'T own a CD burner. Tho maybe I'll get one someday.

I meant doesn't SOUND good in half-hour doses.

And in case I was being completley inchorent, what I'm saying is this: If you need to sort through an hour's worth of stuff to figure out what your favorite songs by Artist X are, how are you gonna get it if albums don't exist anymore? Isn't that sort of a contradiction?(Again, I'm saying it's easier to sort through LESS stuff than MORE -- and this brave new world you're imagining doesn't change that.)

Individual downloads. One-off offerings. "Hey, here's a new song for this week." "Hey, here's a couple of new songs for this week." There are various possibilities. As for older stuff, just grab a few tracks at a time rather than going for a complete download of the album.

I can see how it would seem inconsistent that on the one hand I was saying "The Album is dead, long live the Digital Music Revolution" and on the other hand I was saying "Long CDs are good", but I think that there is some common ground there. The point being that if you really think of the unit of music production being the song, then the question becomes, How do you deliver the songs to the listener? We are beginning to see the outlines of a new model of music distribution based on the Internet and digital music formats; however, iTunes notwithstanding, it has still has a ways to go before it rivals the CD for cultural ubiquity. So in the meantime, I was saying, perhaps it makes sense for artists to stuff CDs as full as they can with whatever songs they have available - because anyone with a CD player can always skip the songs they don't like and listen to the ones they do - this doesn't require any exotic technology (although I did describe a couple of different options that would require something other than the standard CD player). I was just wondering whether the reason that maybe we are resistant to this idea of long CDs has less to do with the inconvenience of hitting the skip button and more to do with an aesthetic ideal of the Album as a conceptual unity - with a song selection and ordering that are ordained from on high.

If I sound a bit conflicted about all of this, it's probably because I am. I actually am an Album-fan. I like the sense that the artist has chosen just these songs and ordered them in a certain way to get a certain effect - and I would swear that in many cases this really happens. In many ways, I actually fear this "devolution" from the album to the song, because I feel that in some ways there's more that can be expressed by an album than by a song. That's also why my accusation of "rockism" was tongue-in-cheek, since I am as guilty as anyone of the very prejudices I was decrying.

22 minutes long exactly.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51VAQwajXHL.jpg

... not that I've even heard the album I just noticed it was 22:00 on wikipedia. While we're at it, I've never seen "Wild in the Streets", why has it never (afaik) been shown on British television?