I’m almost done with a current music CD but last night I added up the amount of music and found there was only about 45 minutes in 8 tracks. That just seems to short for a CD. My last CD release was one hour. That seems about right.
So this got me thinking, what is the average length of music on a CD? How about number of tracks?
So my poll idea is for people to take the last couple of CD’s they bought and leave the number of tracks, the CD length and perhaps even the genre of music (rock, country, classical, ect)
I know, it’s a lot of work. But this would really help me out.
I don’t have any specific numbers to throw out, but I’ve noticed that my rock/pop albums tend to average around 40-50 minutes, whereas a genre like classical often tends to max out the disc at 65-70+ minutes. Jazz albums can be fairly short, but you usually have less problem with the labels combining two albums together than you do in rock, so that ends up being a good hour also.
By far my shortest albums skew toward the genre of original scores for films. I have plenty of movie music that runs over an hour, but some film titles barely manage to get 1/2 hour together–this is particularly true of older movies, since, presumably, they simply take the original LP source tapes and transfer them, which means they’re not dealing with a surplus of material to begin with.
I should note that my observations on rock albums are mostly limited to albums that are not current releases (I rarely buy contemporary music), so those figures are more likely to reflect the average running times in the era of vinyl. YMMV.
Short: John Mellencamp’s “dance naked” at a slender 29 minutes 12 seconds. Sounds like a ripoff quantity-wise, but I do believe John suffered a massive heart attack in there somewhere before it was released. Maybe that was all that they had available. The remake of “Wild Night” alone may be worth the price of admission, though.
Long: believe the theoretical max for a CD in the current format is 74-75 minutes. I’ve seen Rush peg this a few times. Kansas’ “somewhere to elsewhere” weighs in at about 69 minutes. Not that many bands currently recording go with the real long songs anymore. As Bob or Doug MacKenzie once said, “Hit records are short.”
Trackwise: max is 99 tracks per CD. Cracker pegged it on “kerosene hat,” with 12 songs and 87 short random-noise type clips. I may have read that the reason they did it was an attempt to preseve the original order of the songs such that no one would “random play” more than once.
aright heres it: most of my pink floyd stuff is about 45 mins and 10 tracks (more like 90 min and 20 tracks with the wall, but thats 2 discs)…same with led zep, and i think thats a result of the transfer from lp…all my weezer cds are under an hour (41 min, 34, 28, 45, and from 10 - 13 tracks). all my sublime cds are about an hour, the longest being 20 tracks + 2 bonus, 63 minutes.
so, what im saying is this:
classic rock, if a real album and not a compilation, should be about 45 minutes
after that, it can really vary, but 60-70 minutes is a very full cd (they run about 74 min. maximum, usually)
Let’s be mindful of the impact of quantity upon quality. Back in them vinyl days, most rock albums probably averaged 40 minutes or so. Most bands could barely fill that time with decent material and more ambitious efforts usually stunk (how many double albums were really good?).
The advent of the CD allowed about 77 minutes recording time. Now everyone makes a double album and most of the stuff still stinks.
My average in car commute lasts about 40 minutes, so I suppose that is the ideal CD length for me.
