Are you mindful song/track length?

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The band finished recording on the new album last month and I'm really pleased with the format. It's basically four tracks, seperated into two continous sidelong epics of two tracks apiece. We just played straight through a paired set of songs until it was right. And I love the result.

When recording, how many folks here feel that they should keep track length at the 3-6 minute mark? This seems connected to radio airplay time, but I find it interesting that this somewhat arbitrary time has reached the ubiquity it has. The vast majority of recorded material will never be radio singles.. Is it just a matter of pop song structures working out to this approximate length?

I'm also curious about how long songs used to go prior to recorded music. Did the invention of recording technology influence the creation of a 3-6 minute standard?

See also 30 second tracks, etc. Any thoughts on this?

― Polysix Bad Battery (cprek), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 14:47 (nineteen years ago)

I reread a story about Cage's 500(?) year long composition recently, and it got me thinking about all this during the recording process.

― Polysix Bad Battery (cprek), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 14:49 (nineteen years ago)

I'm sure there is a technological component, but really how long can a pop song go on for anyway? forms that have needed more time to develop ideas have always taken it, classical, jazz, prog... each form has its own "short" and "long" right?

I think it's more a matter of how long we can listen to a certain piece of music, how long it'll keep us interested. interesting that album length (the maximum anyway) was dictated by music first ahead of technology in the form of Beethoven's 9th.

― AaronK (AaronK), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 15:30 (nineteen years ago)

Isn't there (in the UK at least) a limit on how long chart singles can be? Because of some nonsense that the KLF pulled? Or was that the Single/EP quandary, rather than individual track length.

I mean, that might help, depending on your definition of "pop".

― Ah! The Feinbos! (kate), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 16:01 (nineteen years ago)

(It's not Cage's composition, it's someone else's decisioin to play a Cage piece [which is called ASLSP, for "as slow as possible"] for 639 years, to commorate the fact that the organ it's being played on was 639 years old when it began. The first year and a half was silent, and now, over five years into it, the second chord just began. But Cage wrote the piece to be about 20 minutes long. It's hard to imagine he'd disapprove of the project, though.)

― Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 12 January 2006 11:12 (nineteen years ago)

In the UK, singles are limited to three songs, total length of 15 minutes.

― tissp! (the impossible shortest specia), Thursday, 12 January 2006 12:03 (nineteen years ago)

You could just make a radio-edit version of the songs you want to have played on any radio station, if it's an issue. Yes did it.

― Abbadavid Berman (Hurting), Thursday, 12 January 2006 15:52 (nineteen years ago)

We aim for 2 mins 49....or thereabouts.

― Dr.C (Dr.C), Thursday, 12 January 2006 16:55 (nineteen years ago)

Funny: just last night, we were working on a new song. We were adding a third verse and chorus, and I wasn't crazy about it -- I thought we should just have two verses/choruses and then go to the extended outro section. It felt too long, otherwise. So I said, "Can we time the song?" Someone else said, "Why? If it feels long to you, it feels long. Why should it matter what it actually is?" And he had a point, but I guess I wanted a more objective measure. Anyway, the song was like 6:50 and probably would've more like 5:30 without the third verse/chorus. So I do sort of feel like it's too long. But maybe I wouldn't feel that way if I felt like the third verse/chorus were actually integral to the song, too, which I don't.

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 12 January 2006 18:56 (nineteen years ago)

Dunno about singles, but I remember reading that the length of old records dictated alot about how Jazz records were recorded. A fair amount of Duke Ellington's recordings were pretty short and tidy.

― Jubalique (Jubalique), Thursday, 12 January 2006 19:04 (nineteen years ago)

My own personal rule with my band though is that the audience will probably get bored of whatever we're playing about 15-20% faster than we will, so since we naturally tend to run long, we consciously try to counter that impulse by shortening things.

― Abbadavid Berman (Hurting), Thursday, 12 January 2006 22:10 (nineteen years ago)

I was just thinking about this. we have a lot of what I guess would be basically "pop-format" songs, and they keep around 5 minutes. But we also have some long ass half-ambient things. the initial versions of these that we recorded both ran 9 to 11 minutes. when we started doing overdubs I got so bored and annoyed with getting lost in parts of them (like, which part of the loop is this?) they both got cut down to 6 minutes.

― kyle (akmonday), Friday, 13 January 2006 00:06 (nineteen years ago)

We need to try and make our songs longer - they average about two and a half minutes, but apparently the most successful pop single length is 3:10 - so we add a couple of catchy choruses at the end to reach it.

― Disciplining And Controlling My Mind (kate), Friday, 13 January 2006 11:24 (nineteen years ago)

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