How many minutes long (or decamoments for non-Americans) should an album be?

I mean centimoments.

30 to 35 is cheeky. The band better offer a LOT of quality in that time frame.

Over 50 is snoresville.

48 hours.

TANTRIC!

For compilations, if they're well sequenced, I appreciate the 80min factor. And I'm known to take advantage of it. I try to mix shorter, but very few mix ideas (as opposed to sit-and-listen album ideas) call for pith more than abundance of joy.

Next: oreo cookie lovers that hate double stuffed oreos.

In extreme cases, up to 45 (one side of a C-90) is ok.

Beyond that, no fucking way (though it's been pulled off once or twice, I admit.)

However, for double-CD's, the lengths of at least one of the 2 discs had better be over 60 minutes, and the other had better be at least over 50, or else they may as well have just trimmed it down to a single disc.

severe editing takes more effort than just stuffing on every dreg they recorded!

what is that? I see it is a Soundgarden album I've never heard of. Are you saying it was a huge flop because it was too damn long?

Does one pay LP price or EP price for such an album? Like Barenaked Ladies, I'm all about value.

P.S. My all-time favorite album, Red Octopus by the Jefferson Starship, clocks in at 42 minutes. Perfect!

For some reason this is cracking me up.

I really feel cheated after spending $13.99 and having to manually use my skip button. Someone else should do that for me. 40 minutes is the max.

Unless a comp., then agreed 79:51.

Yeah, I have come up against several situations where I would have liked to get more onto a CDR80. (yes I know it's possible to do so, but then I can't play it on my discman/boom box/CD player, which frankly ruins it for me) But then I also have times when I end up with a lot of blank space and then awkwardly wonder how or whether I should fill it up. Can't win, I guess.

The old adage that 45 min. was best because you could fit it on one side of a 90 min. cassette tape was all fine and good, except that I found out the hard way too many damn times that Fall albums just did NOT cooperate with that.

I think it may be a mistake to blame the bonus track phenomenon - if an artist specifically sets out to fill that space at the time of doing the album, that's really a much different thing than having things added on at the end later which may or may not have fit with the quality and/or style of the original LP etc.

Recently on a walk I listened to my new CD of Tubeway Army's The Plan. Now I like this stuff quite a lot, and did when I had the vinyl, but even though I walked for an hour I still didn't come to the end of it, and I have to admit it did get a bit samey after awhile. Still I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world, so I don't know what to say, mixed feelings.

All of this is a ridiculously verbose way of saying I'm going to agree with Donut on this one.

I will say though that it's sometimes nice to know you've only got half an hour and just fish out Andrew WK's "I Get Wet" which just doesn't let up.

There are 42 minute albums with lots of filler. Since the 50s. And today.

There are 79 minute CDs that are solid. Since the advent of the CD. And today.

Genres make no difference.

Artists, with occasional advice/force from producers and labels, ultimately determine what gets put on their CD releases. They will care or not what their market is, and edit/expand the sequencing accordingly. There is no magic "maximum time". Whatever works, works. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't.

I'm not going to tell Robert Rich or the Wu-Tang Clan that they should stick to 38 minute CDs, nor am I going to tell Beyonc´, Coldplay, or U2 that they should release double 80-minute CD opuses.

If it's too long, edit it yourself. (That's what I did with, for example, Pavement's Wowee Zowee.) If it's too short, append it with B-sides and stuff from other collections.

The greatest thing about the iPod or even mp3 Cd players is that it helps to eliminate the notion of a "limit", yet doesn't force people to be limitless. But for people like me who enjoy listening to 4 hours of self-sequenced music mixes non-stop while on a train or a plane, i don't need to be told that I should accept no more than 25 to 45 minutes of a song cycle to be valid and good.

..which slides neatly with xhuxkxkxk's comment about EPs being "better" than albums.

I just get defensive when this notion of time limits expands to custom mixes, and not just "traditional" albums, per se.

Ha ha! Mathematician in the house!

- The genre (prog and electronica albums may last for 70 minutes or more, while 70 minutes may be a bit too much for a punk album.
- The amount of ideas and good songs available from the artist's creative output at the time.
- The concept (lots may disagree with me, but I feel that if there is a concept, the album may use 10 or 20 extra minutes just devoted to stuff that "fits the concept", stuff that would otherwise have been completely out of place out of context)

I did this a lot with CD albums in the late 90s and early 2000s, till I pretty much gave up on buying contemporary music for now.

To name but one fairly banal example, editing about 30 minutes out of that last Yo La Tengo record made it much more tolerable. But it also started to seem a little silly.