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Why are some CDs longer than others?
Adam Smith, a loyal MR reader (yes that is his name), writes to me:
I had a very MResque thought today I wanted to share with you. Why are the typical lengths of albums across different music genres so different? In particular, I was thinking most of my rap albums are at least over the hour mark and many run all the way up to the 80-minute maximum. They're usually packed with intros, skits, and lots of 5 minute tracks that have extended intro and outro instrumental beat only sequences. My metal albums, on the other hand, have an average run length of no more than 40 mins. Most albums are between 8 and 10 tracks with little in the way of tangential material. These different run-times show up in other places too. For example, my older jazz albums (i.e. Kind of Blue, Time Out, Blue Train) typically run around 45 mins with a half dozen or so tracks yet my newer jazz albums like MMW's The Dropper run almost the whole 80 mins. Also, prog. rock bands tend to produce much longer albums than garage rock bands. Even adjusting for the fact that prog bands emphasize longer musical passages, they could compensate by just having fewer songs or garage rock bands could just have twice as many (like the White Stripes did on their first album).
Is there a relative price argument for these differences? Or even signaling? Perhaps there is a rat race among rappers to signal they're capable of coming up with enough material to fill out the maximum length, even if it includes lots of filler. Perhaps the recording costs are lower as instrumentation relies so heavily on sampling. Maybe metal runs into diminishing returns after 30 mins or so where the listener becomes numb to the intensity.
I'll offer a few points:
1. The average career of a rapper is short. A long CD increases the chance that something will "stick" and the rapper won't get too many other chances to try.
2. Some metal bands develop great loyalty among their followers and achieve durable franchises. That gives them a lower discount rate and they are more inclined to save up material for the future. Plus they are marketing an overall sound -- rather than clever particular innovations -- and if the first forty (five?) minutes don't convince you nothing will. Rap songs probably have a higher individual variance.
3. Many older albums are short for technological reasons, plus the albums were due in relatively rapid succession for contractual reasons. In the 1960s there was lots of technological advance in music, so if you sat on the sidelines for a few years you could become obsolete.
4. It is relatively easy for a contemporary jazz artist to tack on additional improvisations and he can choose standard compositions if necessary. Other forms of popular music cannot expand quantity so easily without hitting a wall in terms of quality. One prediction here is that "compositional jazz" albums should be shorter in average length than albums of jazz improvisation, contemporary that is.
5. If you wanted a somewhat strained explanation, you could argue that the longer CD is a more bundled product and it will make economic sense as a form of price discrimination, the more varied the valuations of the audience. This would require that rap CD buyers have a higher variance of marginal valuation.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 28, 2009 at 07:19 AM in Music | Permalink
Comments
Division of labor. Producers are a big part of more modern music such as hip-hop and the like. While producers played a large role in the sound and evolution of Def Leppard or U2, they don't add much content.
Posted by: Andrew at Sep 28, 2009 7:26:34 AM
Early metal and indie bands, like all garage bands, had little access to quality studios. Before digital recording time spent in the studio was a bands biggest expense. Recording and mixing rap music is easier and less time consuming. Early rap was made by and for DJs, the more tracks, samples, and loops the better.
Path dependency, and initial conditions. Whatever the pioneer's do, the next generation will copy. Pioneers also want to differentiate themselves from rival genres. If the progs are making long songs/albums, the punks will do the opposite.
Posted by: stephen at Sep 28, 2009 8:08:47 AM
You need to make clear for younger readers that early jazz albums were produced at a time when no more than 40-45 minutes could comfortably fit on a long-playing vinyl album. [Audiophiles then debated the degradation in pressing and sound of the rare albums that pushed the 55-60 minute mark].
The more interesting question is why reissues aren't bundled with more extras. And of course some classic reissues do include extra takes, interviews, etc.
Posted by: jn at Sep 28, 2009 8:27:34 AM
Don't leave the label out of this equation. The simple fact is that for a rock/pop artist, labels want the album to be relatively short. Why, I don't know. Perhaps they believe that the listener's attention span is only forty minutes long?
There are a number of alternative and garage bands who record scads of music only to release the standard issue 10-12 songs every time. The rest surfaces in EPs, b-sides and bonus downloads.
Note that the exception here, prog rock bands, tend to reside on indy labels which no doubt gives them greater control over how much music goes on the disc. Rap is a newer phenomenon and probably side steps this 'traditional' way of recording music.
Posted by: Tom Noir at Sep 28, 2009 8:32:33 AM
Most record companies have a rule that bands have to put at least 9 (or something) songs on a CD in order to get contractual credit for having issued an album. Anything less than that is an EP, anything more than that is additional effort that the artist is not financially compensated for.
Prog-rock and rap artists pack material onto their albums because they're not bound by the contractual arrangements of a "pop" band. They are given less money and often self-produce. As a result, they offer longer albums to give their fans better value-for-money. The album is the artistic medium, whereas "pop" bands are more interested in a hit single than an epic album.
I'm surprised to hear that metal albums are shorter than average. Most metal bands I'm familiar with produce long albums, for all the same reasons rap and prog-rock artists do.
Posted by: Ryan at Sep 28, 2009 8:38:42 AM
Some further points about metal:
Many metal songs are very fast (170+ beats per minute). It's difficult to write lengthy songs at that speed--the themes exhaust themselves after a while, and one doesn't want to make songs longer just for sake of length. In contrast, rap is much slower. So, a 10 track death metal album will tend to be shorter than a 10 track rap album.
There's lots of variance in metal, too. Progressive metal bands tend to have lengthier (20 minutes +) compositions, and they tend to have 75 minute albums. Fans expect something epic.
Posted by: Jasoon Brennan at Sep 28, 2009 8:44:48 AM
Live performances. It's physically taxing to play metal or other fast rock/punk.
Once you're an arena rock act, you can't play fast, tight songs. The venue mangles the sound so you play songs with big, ringing chords instead. You can play those all night without fatigue.
The recorded albums have to be the result of the live performances.
Posted by: Trevindor at Sep 28, 2009 8:45:39 AM
People still buy CD's?
Posted by: Peter at Sep 28, 2009 9:52:18 AM
I think both proggers and rappers try to make their album a real, grade A "event" that people will perk up and pay attention to. So each of them stuffs the album so that people will see the length and think "this is a big deal." The amount of material is a signal for the prowess or prolificness of the artist.
Posted by: mk at Sep 28, 2009 10:00:07 AM
Also, when it comes to rap, a great deal of value is put on being relevant. The trouble is, the more relevant you are, the more dated your material quickly becomes... it is difficult to be both relevant and timeless. Therefore, there is no premium to saving up a lot of material for years and years for a rapper... material that is three years old is full of three year old cultural and social references. It is better to put all the material you have on your current album.
Posted by: Vehical Driver at Sep 28, 2009 10:13:16 AM
The answer isn't that complicated. Rap songs require less effort on the instrumentation side. Since beats are almost exclusively electronic, they can be made in high volumes at relatively low costs. Rock, jazz, and other genres require more complex instrumentation, especially for songs with live/real instrumentation. As the effort and costs are higher in making these music genres, it shouldn't surprise that albums would contain fewer songs. Another indication of rap music's relative ease in creation is the fact that artists not only produce more songs per album but also they produce albums more frequently than the genres above. Again, this highlights the low cost of production. Some rappers are also qualified freestylers, allowing them to enjoy low production costs on the lyric side of music creation. While interesting, Tyler's comments are too sophiscated and largely incorrect in my view.
Posted by: Econometron at Sep 28, 2009 10:26:38 AM
Regarding #1, does it happen that established rap artists are producing shorter CDs? (This would be evidence for it, although a negative would not necessarily disprove it). And what is the relative rate of CD release among these various groups?
Posted by: Xan at Sep 28, 2009 10:36:39 AM
True the vinyl LPs would only play for about 45 minutes. Also labels must pay mechanical royalties to songwriter and publisher per song (often they share in publishing) so too many (non hit) songs per album increase costs. Also consider the obvious costs of writing/recording and producing each additional song.
When is the last time you listened to an album all the way through anyway? It's more a singles market these days. The shiny discs are going the way of cassette tapes. Online delivery is more convenient. Like Daniel Lanois said " it's possible to write and record a new song overnight, immediately post it on the website and have money in your paypal account the next day. The problem is it winds up on free torrent sites the next day too.
Posted by: CB at Sep 28, 2009 10:44:19 AM
To match capital to investment time horizon?
Posted by: Andrew at Sep 28, 2009 10:51:52 AM
The question is, why is someone who is smart enough to read and understand MR listening to that crap?
Posted by: DM at Sep 28, 2009 11:18:08 AM
It signal's quality for sure. If I was to rank my top 20 albums of all time, the top 10 would have a significantly shorter running time. A couple cases in point: Nas's Illmatic (among the greatest hip hop albums) runs only 39:43, whereas It Was Written (this is is like comparing First Blood to Rambo II here...) runs in at just shy of an hour. Metallica's Kill 'Em All clocks at 51:13; St. Anger (shudder) runs an interminable 75:01.
I think some better points have been made with respect to jazz and metal, but length is definitely a signal of quality in hip hop recordings.
Posted by: Josh at Sep 28, 2009 11:21:10 AM
It signals quality for sure. If I was to rank my top 20 albums of all time, the top 10 would have a significantly shorter running time. A couple cases in point: Nas's Illmatic (among the greatest hip hop albums) runs only 39:43, whereas It Was Written (this is is like comparing First Blood to Rambo II here...) runs in at just shy of an hour. Metallica's Kill 'Em All clocks at 51:13; St. Anger (shudder) runs an interminable 75:01.
I think some better points have been made with respect to jazz and metal, but length is definitely a signal of quality in hip hop recordings.
Posted by: Josh at Sep 28, 2009 11:21:36 AM
Seems like a lot of speculation and confusion; it isn't that complicated - albums are 10-13 songs. If it is music for the radio, most of those songs will be 3:30-5:00 minutes long, so you get 45-50 minutes of music. If they aren't for the radio then the songs might be longer (prog-rock, jazz) or shorter (punk).
Questions about album length really boil down to two questions:
1. Why are albums 10-12 songs? I think a few people answered that persuasively already.
2. Why do rap albums, in particular, include so much extraneous stuff (the intros, outros, skits, etc.)? I think it's just a cultural expectations thing, but I don't know.
Posted by: Bob Montgomery at Sep 28, 2009 12:11:52 PM
Indie and alternative rock albums got shorter when people started buying them on LP again. The difference mostly seems to be in the form of fewer songs rather than shorter songs. The aforementioned label pressure probably explains the difference in length between major-label and indie albums of similar styles.
My suspicion is that a lot of hip-hop albums are padded to make them seem like a good value to people who don't normally buy albums.
Posted by: Sean P. at Sep 28, 2009 12:13:46 PM
Bob Montgomery asked:
1. Why are albums 10-12 songs? I think a few people answered that persuasively already.
2. Why do rap albums, in particular, include so much extraneous stuff (the intros, outros, skits, etc.)? I think it's just a cultural expectations thing, but I don't know.
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I think history plays a lot into the answer to (1). Before recorded music, music was as long as it needed to be for the audience. It's weird to listen to really old folk songs--the number of verses they would have was staggering! And obviously classical music lengths were largely constrained by how long you could expect an audience to sit in a theater and listen--which was a pretty long time, it turned out.
So in the 1920s, recording technology is mature, and the 78 rpm record becomes the standard way to physically sell music. Suddenly, songs have to be 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 minute length. The 45 rpm single reinforced that limitation. The 33 1/3 RPM long play record permitted music to balloon out to 23 (more or less) minutes per side. Obviously this was great for classical musicians and more ambitious jazz musicians. But for pop music, it didn't make much difference at first because the "single" had become the firmly established length of a song, both through 45s and on the radio. So LPs would tend to have about 10 songs on them.
Starting with jazz and classical in the 50s, and then throughout the 60s in other genres, musical artists discarded the standard "single" length for a song when it suited them. Especially as record sales came to be dominated by LPs over 45s. So the standard LP length of 45 minutes total became the norm and acquired the force of tradition. When CDs came along, it was obvious that you could fit a lot more than 45 minutes worth of stuff on them, but because LPs coexisted with CDs for quite a while, you didn't see all that extra space on the CD being used very often. Hence the notion of the bonus track--material you could only get on the CD.
Rap artists, in one sense, are just taking advantage of the the space available to them on a CD. They presumably don't have much invested in the "tradition" of the LP because the LP was dying out just at the time their genre was being born. Perhaps that's one reason metal acts still record as if they were creating LPs--their genre's creation coincided with the period in which the LP was the dominant music product.
Posted by: RWBoyd at Sep 28, 2009 12:59:10 PM
I'm not sure how the trend for relatively long rap albums began, but I can tell you that the mid-90s, consumer expectations played a big part in perpetuating that trend.
Back then, I worked a regular Saturday shift in a record store a friend managed. There were usually three staff members working a shift, and we'd alternate "picks" for the CDs we played on the store's stereo system. I usually opted for indie rock while my co-worked often picked rap. It didn't take long for me to realize I was losing out in terms of percentage of time for my selections, as my picks usually lasted less than 45 minutes, while the rap albums were all an hour plus. Anyway, my friend claimed that if a rap artist actually released an album of less than 60 minutes, people would bring it back the store for a refund, saying they were ripped off because the CD was "too short."
Posted by: David Harrell at Sep 28, 2009 1:17:30 PM
I think on the first points, in particular, it has more to do with, honestly, the effort involved in creating a song. Producers write the music for rap songs, and adding a verse is generally as simple as copy/pasting that segment to another area in the song. Metal songs involve a lot more changes in the music, and consequently even having a band learn the song is a longer process, much less writing enough content within it to keep it interesting. Speed metal ("protest the hero" anyone?) is an even more complicated illustration of that, because it can involve dozens of musical changes, with virtually no repetition of ideas, in a very short span. Therefore, the song doesn't need to be long to cover a lot of ground, however it takes a massive amount of effort to write.
Posted by: Peter Boysen at Sep 28, 2009 1:45:11 PM
I'm a pretty heavy fan of rap and i think there is definitely a signaling component. A primary example was the deluge of double albums in rap in the mid 90's. Releasing a double album was seen as something only the very best rappers were capable of and thus there became a strong incentive for the top rappers to release such albums. They were meant to be THE DEFINITIVE album for the rapper; their magnum opus must be a double album. We see this clearly in 2pac's All Eyez on Me, Notorious BIG's Life After Death. After these initial blockbusters we saw whoever wanted to be the best rapper would release a double album such as Bone Thugz n Harmony Jay-Z's Blueprint 2 and so on.
A lot of it was surely copycatting the best selling albums. Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle and Wu Tang's 36 Chambers sort of set the stage and was a extremely popular album so many rappers followed suit because those were the albums they wanted to emulate.
Posted by: Sohaib at Sep 28, 2009 5:54:30 PM
#5 is the best explanation, it is not strained. Rap artists try to give their (poorer) audience their money's worth.
Posted by: Paul N at Sep 28, 2009 7:31:00 PM
Adding to the comment on division of labor above, the ubiquity of the "feature" on rap albums also plays a role. Many rap songs will feature one or more additional mc. See, as an extreme example, Wale's "Back to the Feature", clocking in at just under 80 minutes, about half of which are filled by other people rapping.
Posted by: Trevor at Sep 28, 2009 10:23:34 PM
