Why are so many songs between 3 – 4 minutes long?
In: Other
Because it’s a good length? What would the alternative be?
It’s the radio standard.
Radio stations expect songs to be within certain time limits to enable them to have their DJs on air and talking, as well as giving appropriate air time availability for adverts.
Songs that are much longer than 4 minutes either have specific radio edits, or the DJ will cut it short.
It likely was originally because of phonograph records having limited time to run, at about 3 minutes per side. This was enforced by the advent of radio broadcasting this selected for set short compositions you can plan set advertisement pauses around.
I think it proved to be popular enough, not overstaying their welcome and not demanding people that want to enjoy a composition to pause it in the middle. I think it also made life a bit easier for bands that would otherwise market things differently. Releasing a single now is much better than a whole composition. And you can create a consumable single from any of the songs in the album. Also, it makes for an easier time for bands to build a repertoire with which they can tour.
But yeah, we are now trained for the attentions span of a songms length.
Because the format originated with vinyl singles that were 7 inches in diameter and played at 45 rpm.
Those singles fit about one song per side.
The other common format was bigger discs that played at 33 rpm and could hold a much longer amount of music per side.
Since hardware was simple back in the day, it was easy to make record players who could play both LPs and singles with just a switch that changed speed and little coaster in the middle for the differently sized central holes of the record.
Music labels began producing records that held more than a dozen songs on an LP and then released the “best” songs separately as singles. Meaning that all songs on an album had to fit on a single.
Later Radio stations ended up influencing the length of songs as they didn’t want to play songs that were too long.
Nowadays most of these outside factors are not really present anymore, but tradition keeps the old song length concept alive.
People are correctly pointing out that recording formats – dating back to the wax cylinder – are a factor here. However, I would argue that these media reinforced the 3-4 format rather than creating it. The format of modern albums is broadly influenced by the structure of symphonies in classical music, which would be a 30-40 minute symphony split into 3-5 minute movements.
So why did this structure emerge in the first place? I think there are a handful of sociological reasons. This sounds obvious, but the amount of time any piece of entertainment can be is broadly defined by the length of a person’s waking day and the availability of leisure time. Between work, daily tasks etc. the average person is probably looking for up to a couple of hours of entertainment at most, so a 30-40 minute symphony makes some sense.
But it’s hard for a solo composer to “manage” an entire 30-40 minute continuous piece of music; it then makes sense to chunk this down into movements so that you can focus your attention on 3-5 minute building blocks that fit together into the bigger dynamic shape of the symphony. In some symphonies these movements feel very distinct while in others they flow into each other completely seamlessly. In any case, each movement has it’s own internal dynamics, motifs and musical ideas. This approach has held true for many years, of course influenced and consolidated by factors such as formats and media.
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