By “repeat and fade” endings, I mean when pop/rock/similar-genre songs end by singing one line (often the title or the last line of the chorus) over a few times, gradually getting quieter until the music fades away competely. Where and when did this start? Did some record company in the 50’s (or earlier?) develop a technique to do it and it became the New Thing? Why did it catch on (personally, I do not like it because it makes me sound silly when I try to sing along. 
Ok, sillier.)?
My apologies if this has been discussed – nothing came up for any search terms I tried.
All I can say is, I assume it became popular because it was much easier than writing a satisfying ending to a song. Whether anyone actually likes it, I don’t know.
Moved to Cafe Society.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
I think the fade-out has a place, although a lot of artists do seem to use it in lieu of writing an actual ending. I’ve heard some bands who use it very well. The indie pop band Pinback, for example, makes frequent and effective use of fade-outs at the end of their songs. Their songs tend to be very rhythmically repetitive, with the vocal melodies providing a main hook while the backing instrumentation introduces subtle variations of repeating motifs. As one review aptly noted:
Pinback’s use of fade-out endings continues that feeling of clockwork precision, allowing the song to come to a close without an abrupt stopping point.
The tune and the hook are the only important parts of the song. The rest is superfluous.
Fade outs in songs are O.K., but they got no place on a message board
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My WAG is that it was a radio thing. It’s much easier for a DJ to merge one song into another if the first one fades at the end instead of ending distinctly.
Waiting for a DJ to confirm.
At the end of the “studio version” of her song “What Was I Thinking”, Christine Lavin does a repeat-and-fade-out like this. In the background she comments on it. Her comments fade out with the rest of the song, but if you crank up the volume, you can hear it all. It goes something like this:
"Oh my God – how am I going to end this song? I know – I’ll do what everyone else does. I’ll go to a fadeout. You thought it was an artistic choice, but they really don’t know how to end the song, so they just fade out. Except for Spanky and Our Gang in “Trying to get to know you” – that was an artistic choice. But in all the other cases they don’t know how to end the song.
What are you still listening for? Don’t you people have lives?"
The Smithereens did/do this all the time; to a fault.
They tended to repeat the title of the song endlessly in a fadeout.
After I pointed this out to a friend of mine who really liked them, he got pissed off at me because he says he can no longer enjoy their songs as a result.
Ooops.
Now that I think about it, the last comment (aslmost inaudible) is “You must have ears like a dog!”
I read somewhere that song fade-outs became popular in the 50s-60s when jukeboxes really came into their prime. The song fading out had something of a psychological effect on those hearing the song. The listener can hear the song continuing, but it simply gets too quiet for us to hear. It is thought to trigger a response that the listener is “missing out” on the rest of the song. Allegedly, this caused listeners to be more likely to “put another nickel in the nickelodeon”.
Repeating lines? I just chalk that up to laziness.
“Repeat and fade” is a recording phenomenon, and songs that end that way were mostly likely written directly for recording, not for live performance. By the late 1940s, the majority of music heard on radio was from recordings, not live performance. This paved the way for songwriters and record producers to think in terms of songs as recordings, and to make new innovations in the way songs were recorded.