![]() ![]() Most classical music is considerably more complex than your average pop song, but even so a single movement of a sonata or a symphony usually clocks in at no more than ten minutes or so. ![]() Compare this to classical music and you see it more clearly. Both the lyrics and the melodies tend to be fairly simple, and after a few minutes they’ve exhausted their potential. The core explanation, I think, is that most popular music simply doesn’t have the complexity to sustain itself beyond a few minutes. The obvious answer is that this is, in fact, what most fans want. Why do radio stations insist on three minutes? They don’t run ads after literally every song, so it’s not because advertisers demand it. ![]() Either that, or radio stations will edit the song down to the standard, making it three to four minutes, just like the 45.īut this begs the question. The length of a song on an album doesn’t matter for anyone except for the artist and fans, but a song that hopes to make money and be played on the radio simply has to be a certain length. “What drives what is heard on the radio is an artist’s desire to have their music hit the mainstream, and a record label’s desire to profit from that,” Steve Jones, vice president at the Canadian radio firm Newcap, told NPR….Jones is right. It makes sense to assume that since the basis of the three-minute song was the 78 and then 45 rpm single, then songs would become longer as technology evolved….But the length of songs had its biggest jump, according to this data, between the ’60s and ’80s, and very little has changed from the ’90s to 2008, a time period when the technology of music changed drastically. The historical basis for this is obvious: 45 rpm singles hold about three minutes of music, so modern pop music was born in an era when technology limited songs to about three minutes or so. Kelsey McKinney asks today why popular songs are almost all 3-5 minutes long. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |