Even after 78s. The '70s funk bands mentioned above tended to go long, and many compositions were split between the sides of 45 RPM singles. A number of funk radio hits are really just the “Part 1,” with a fade.
Note that some of those were brought into music for reasons other than “artistic choice”. Auto-tune was introduced to compensate for the lackluster singing ability of the latest teen idol–recognizing the pop side of the business is more about looks than talent. Compression was introduced to give the song a presence on the radio such that you’re less liekly to tune away.
Put “fade” in that same category; it can be used for artistic reasons, but in most cases it’s just traditional based on the now-antiquated needs of the industry that promoted it.
Actually it is that simple. In Western music, any progression can be resolved within its key structure. If they played it live, they would be able to do it without a problem.
I, for one, would be greatly impressed if I ever saw a band continulally play the closing riff over and over again while the sound engineer lowered their volume gradually until it became inaudible.
It’s funny, I was just thinking about fade-outs, because I was listening to a Husker Du mix I made and I realized they only have one song (IIRC) that ends on a fade, and it’s the last song on their last album. Rare in pop/rock music.
Yep! One of my jobs is shooting concert video, and my main client is various locations of the School of Rock. The show directors often have to invent endings for songs that faded out on record.
Yes, as I said, you can always create a cold end. In that example, they could simply end on the tonic. My point is, there are some songs that are structured in such a way that a cold end sounds kind of lame, as opposed to others that lend themselves to a cold end.
Do tell? I can’t think of a single one. Classical as in pre-20th century? How would that work?
George Crumb’s “Vox balaena” and Holst’s “Neptune.” Both 20th-century works, admittedly.
I’ve heard that the Holst is/was the first piece of music to ever employ the fade technique, but I don’t have as much popular-music knowledge as I would need to confirm this.
In the Crumb piece, in performance, the performers are instructed to play the last phrase quieter and quieter, until they finally just mime playing their instruments. (Come to think of it, I wonder if this would work in performances of rock/pop music. 
)
Hmm, I’ve seen The Planets in concert (in fact, Jupiter is pretty high on my list of all-time favorite pieces), but that didn’t occur to me. Sure, the choir performs behind doors that get closed, so it is sort of a fade-out. There are also some Mahler Symphonies that fade almost into nothing - in the Ninth, there are many minutes where you don’t dare to take a breath due to the tension. In those cases, the effect is almost opposite from the one in pop music, though - the fade makes the music much more intense.
Auto tune can be used for minor tweaks on harmony tracks or otherwise live vocal tracks. You just didn’t notice. That’s fine.
Compression was used to balance dynamics in playing - like Eddie Van Halen alternating between loud power chords and softer harmonic tapping, or as an integral part of a sound, like a Nashville Cat getting a Squish in their Chicken Pickin’ tone, Robert Smith with the Cure or Larry Carlton with his max’d Dyna Comp sound. But when it is used to flatten out a track so you can raise the whole sound level - blech.
I’m not a fan of fade-outs.
However, I am a musician, and I’ve played a lot of gigs over the decades. It’s easy to cover a song that fades out, there are a few ways to do it:
Just stop at the end of a chord progression. All working musicians know how to do this, it’s extremely basic. If you’re not counting bars, you just wait for a nod from the band leader.
Or you compose a specific ending, which, again, is very basic stuff for any musician good enough to be playing gigs in the first place. You slow down, you tag the root chord onto the end of the progression, easy peasy.
Or, if you want to have fun with it, you manually fade out. Which means you gradually reduce volume as you go along. Again, any musician worth his/her salt can do this. It’s only slightly more difficult than the preceding two options.
Or, you can write an ending. I’ve done it. It’s actually easier than learning some songs by ear 
Ba-da
Bop-pa-da
Bop!
Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
That’s how I’d end all of them.
Not a fan of the fade-out.
IIRC the music video game Rock Band had to make up endings to fade-out songs. They sounded pretty good.
If you were covering a song that faded out, why wouldn’t you just go to Youtube and find a live version and see how they ended it?
When I was in a band and we did covers (pre-Youtube), I don’t recall it being a problem. Just decide on an ending and do it.
I used to think it was lazy but now it doesn’t bother me. Whatever works. No point in contriving something if it doesn’t come naturally.
I hate fade-outs that take like half of the song repeating the same 8-bar sequence 684 times.
Fades that have mini-solos, bass runs, or other stuff are interesting
I still prefer an ending.
One of the worst offenders is “Take it to the Limit” by The Eagles. How I hate the ending of that song, they repeat “take it to the limit” eleventy teen times.
I read an interview with David Gilmour talking about putting together the Floyd’s greatest hits collection, they had a bit of trouble since… “None of our songs have endings”. All their major albums pretty much run all the songs together. The only song with a real ending will be the last on the album* sometimes not even then.
Worse than a fade out is when a song doesn’t fade, it just sort of peters out, Queen did this a lot. One of their songs turns into I do like to be beside the seaside 
- that’s not completely true but it’s a good approximation.