I just bought the newest Breaking Benjamin CD. It clocks in at just under 40 minutes. Knowing that most CDs will hold up to 80 minutes of music, I gotta ask, why’s it so short? Couldn’t you flesh it out a bit, give me 16 or 17 songs instead of just 11? How about a cover song? Or an acoustic rendition of the main radio single? You know, something to keep me interested in buying your CDs.
And these flash intros they put on these things are annoying as hell. When I put a CD into my computer, it’s to rip it into MP3 so I can put it in the shuffle with the rest of my music. All the flash intro does is slow my computer down for a minute until I discover it so I can shut it down.
I agree about the Flash stuff. I never bother watching any of that crap.
I don’t agree about CDs being too short. There are few artists today who can fill a 40-minute CD with good songs, let alone an 80-minute one.
I read an interview with Daniel Lanois once where he said he felt CDs should be shorter because people no longer have “sides” to demarcate the halves of an album; since people play them all in one go, he felt the ideal length of a CD should be 35-40 minutes. I’d have no problem with the principle if the prices reflected the reduced content.
I think it usually has more to do with the record company producing the album than the artists themselves. Most commercial CD releases clock in at around 10-13 songs. If the artist or group has more songs, the ones that don’t make the cut will be held in reserve for a future release.
This also helps explain why Tupac Shakur can have more discs after his death than before.
I admit it can be annoying. Green Day and Blink 182 are notorious for having discs that clock in at right around 30 minutes in running time for the same reason – most of their tunes are less than 3 minutes in length.
As to why artists don’t include acoustic versions of songs on their regular release…it also has to do with $$$. Maroon 5 released an album featuring acoustic versions of hits from *Songs About Jane * earlier this year. Gotta fulfill those contractual albums somehow – otherwise, how can they renegotiate their contract and start actually making money?
12" records couldn’t take more than 45-ish minutes, in total. So expecting every album to be 80 minutes long would be like going back 30 years and asking “why isn’t every album a gatefold?” Answer - because it’s a heck of a lot of music to create!
If you’re putting out a CD, you go with the best assortment of tracks you can come up with. You don’t dig around for extra stuff- there’s no benefit to you to pad the CD out with weaker tracks.
One Metallica album (Load) was almost exactly 80 minutes. It wasn’t that good an album anyway, but deliberately stretching it out as long as they could didn’t help.
As I’m sure you know, you don’t see this in the underground metal world, where the average album length is probably closer to 55 minutes. I’m no expert, but I’d guess it has to do with the problem of getting people to buy an album when there’s no single and no TV stations, radio stations, or clubs that would play the single even if it existed. You need fan loyalty there, and you’re not going to get that by producing a 40-minute album with 2-3 single quality songs and a bunch of filler. But if you have the option of releasing singles that’ll get wide exposure, you can get away with that.
Why do they do that? If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a matter of ROI. Album prices are the same no matter how much music they contain, and sales are pretty much dependent on the strength of the singles. So the less time the band spends recording, the greater ROI they and the record company get.
Okay, so maybe asking for 80 minutes is a bit much. How about 60 minutes? If they expect us to shell out $15 or more (which I hardly ever do), couldn’t they try a little harder to make it worth it?
I’m not sure it’s quite that premeditated. To get the extra 20 or 30 minutes, the band has to write a bunch more songs, which means they wait longer between albums and possible spend more time (and money) in the studio.
I think that - just like in the vinyl days - labels would consider themselves lucky to have 10-12 quality songs/40 quality minutes from an artist’s release no matter what the format.
I don’t think they wait longer. I think they just bang out crappy songs in 10 minutes to fill more time.
I think the exact opposite of the OP.
I’d like to see most of my CDs shortened to about 35 minutes.
I want to put a CD on and listen to it end to end. If it’s over 35-40 minutes, there’s some major problems with that.
Typically, they haven’t edited the CD enough so you’re left with the crap. If they don’t stack all the crap at the back, you get the weak songs mixed throughout. If they do stack it at the back, I always wind up taking the CD off before I get to them.
Unless you’re there live, 45+ is just too long to listen to one band anyway. No one makes albums over that with every song being good.
And by the time they make the next CD maybe they’ve figured out that every note that comes out of their heads doesn’t have to be recorded and sold and they can leave the weak tunes in the can.
Yeah, and all movies should last at least two and a half hours, to make the money we shell out for a ticket worth it.
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I’d say there are two kinds of CD’s. Kind #1: The original “work of art”, meant to be listened to from start to finish. Kind #2: The compilation/collection of songs (includes things like “Best of” discs, Various Artists mixes, and classical CD’s with multiple works).
I tend to agree with the OP’s point when it comes to “Kind #2” CD’s; I’d like to get as much music as possible for my money. I definitely do not agree when it comes to “Kind #1”: those should be whatever length “works” based on how many good songs the artist has available, the artistic integrity of the whole album, etc. But even then, anything more than about 40-50 minutes, even if it’s all good stuff and doesn’t feel padded, can be kinda hard to absorb and it takes me longer to appreciate the CD (the latest Fleetwood Mac album is one example of this that comes to mind).
I am a happy person somedays. Today, it was because the new live Evanescence concert CD had an extra song after the concert… and came with a DVD of the concert, with behind the scenes and all their videos.
I find myself endlessly annoyed that the Zappa trust is so money grubbing. Frank always had an eye out for giving fans value for their disc, so he tended to combine multiple 30-minute albums into a single CD. Apostrophe (’) / Overnite Sensation is the classic example. After he died, the trust discontinued all of these double CDs and reissued the albums on CD individually, which is highly annoying.
Generally, when I listen to an actual CD, I’m in the car. And if it’s rush hour, I can’t get anywhere in 30 minutes. I find it annoying in the extreme to be stuck in traffic for longer than the duration of an entire CD, regardless of how short that CD may be.
Besides, using a 12 CD shuffler, I have a hard time justifying putting in a CD with only 30 minutes of music, when so many of them had 55 minutes or more.
I guess it doesn’t bother me that much if a CD is short, especially if it’s by one of the “popular” mainstream artists. Usually there are only one or two songs that I like on them anyway.
However, I do appreciate how hard the underground artists work. The ones that haven’t quite made it big. They’re the ones with the 60 and 70-minute albums that I just love. Especially country singers. A lot of their CDs will have 16 or 17 songs on them, long ones too.