Ofc there is some exceptions i.e G’n’R ballads, which are ~5 min long. I was just wondering if is it a rule for whole music industry? Would you listen to your favourite song if it was bit longer?
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I remember a teacher said it was because of shorter attention spans now but I knew she was pulling this out of her arse because there are songs from the 60s that where 3 minutes
It actually goes back to the size of records. There used to be a specific record size that would hold up to 5 minutes on one side. This created the initial idea of the ~3 minute song (you didn’t want to use the full size of the record).
As Radio Stations started playing music, they got used to this 3 minute length. Even as records came that had much more capacity, you didn’t want to break that 3 minute rule, since radio stations wouldn’t want to play it, since they would lose potential ad time by playing such a long song.
As for today in the streaming world, a lot is dictated by how Spotify and similar services pay artists. For example, Spotify pays an artist when their song is listened to for at least 31 seconds. It doesn’t matter if the song ends at 31 seconds, or if it goes on for an hour. They get the same payment. This means that long songs aren’t as great on Spotify, since you get paid per song play.
It has to do with the old 78 RPM records. A 78 can hold about 3 minutes of music without having to flip them, so a song couldn’t really be more than 3 minutes long in practice.
While modern media can hold songs of much longer lengths the practice of having a song be about 3 minutes never really changed. People expect at song to be about 3 minutes long, so songs are generally written to be about 3 minutes long.
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