Did the CD-length album kill the album?

Yes & no. The CD's length helped albums that were multi LP's because you could put everything on one CD & listen to it completely. Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", The Who's "Tommy" & Donna Summer's "Bad Girls" for example. The way it hurt was by way of the extra space to put in throwaways & call them bonus tracks. because of this, artists got the idea that they could slap on anything (filler) with the hits & call it an album & the public would continue to buy them. Maybe it was downloads where we could pick & choose what we wanted without giving the albums a real chance to prove themselves. I'm sure there are other reasons & maybe it's a combination of them all. I just wouldn't put all the blame on the CD & it's length. My opinion.

 

Yes & no. The CD's length helped albums that were multi LP's because you could put everything on one CD & listen to it completely. Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", The Who's "Tommy" & Donna Summer's "Bad Girls" for example. The way it hurt was by way of the extra space to put in throwaways & call them bonus tracks. because of this, artists got the idea that they could slap on anything (filler) with the hits & call it an album & the public would continue to buy them. Maybe it was downloads where we could pick & choose what we wanted without giving the albums a real chance to prove themselves. I'm sure there are other reasons & maybe it's a combination of them all. I just wouldn't put all the blame on the CD & it's length. My opinion.

 

Yes & no. The CD's length helped albums that were multi LP's because you
could put everything on one CD & listen to it completely. Elton John's
"Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", The Who's "Tommy" & Donna Summer's "Bad Girls"
for example. The way it hurt was by way of the extra space to put in throwaways
& call them bonus tracks. because of this, artists got the idea that they
could slap on anything (filler) with the hits & call it an album & the
public would continue to buy them. Maybe it was downloads where we could pick
& choose what we wanted without giving the albums a real chance to prove
themselves. I'm sure there are other reasons & maybe it's a combination of
them all. I just wouldn't put all the blame on the CD & it's length. My
opinion.

 

Yes & no. The CD's length helped albums that were multi LP's because you could put everything on one CD & listen to it completely. Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", The Who's "Tommy" & Donna Summer's "Bad Girls" for example. The way it hurt was by way of the extra space to put in throwaways & call them bonus tracks. because of this, artists got the idea that they could slap on anything (filler) with the hits & call it an album & the public would continue to buy them. Maybe it was downloads where we could pick & choose what we wanted without giving the albums a real chance to prove themselves. I'm sure there are other reasons & maybe it's a combination of them all. I just wouldn't put all the blame on the CD & it's length. My opinion.

 

Yes & no. The CD's length helped albums that were multi LP's because you could put everything on one CD & listen to it completely. Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", The Who's "Tommy" & Donna Summer's "Bad Girls" for example. The way it hurt was by way of the extra space to put in throwaways & call them bonus tracks. because of this, artists got the idea that they could slap on anything (filler) with the hits & call it an album & the public would continue to buy them. Maybe it was downloads where we could pick & choose what we wanted without giving the albums a real chance to prove themselves. I'm sure there are other reasons & maybe it's a combination of them all. I just wouldn't put all the blame on the CD & it's length. My opinion.

 

^ Somebody wanna check up on this guy, make sure he's alright?

 

^ Somebody wanna check up on this guy?

 

To answer the OP, yes, in part.

One album that for me typifies the "problem" with the 1 hour bloated CD album release is R.E.M.'s "New Adventures In Hi-Fi". Made at the height of CD take-over when vinyl was getting very hard to find, it contains many tracks that would have been dropped had the 40 minute vinyl LP still been the main carrier format for the traditional rock album. I even recall some mainstream music journalists making a similar point during the mid-90's. When 40 minutes was your maximum you had to cull the lesser material and tighten things up a bit. The "CD album" encouraged artists to dump everything on the album to pad it out to "full length". This was not always the best thing.

 

No, if anything, it was iTunes' focus on singles over albums that prevented the "digital album" from taking off. For several years, album credits weren't even part of digital albums, and even today, you're lucky if you get some. That and the lossyness of mp3 is why I still prefer CDs. Lossless downloads are something which I've found to be acceptable because I can always burn my own CD-R version of an album from it, and together with the LaTeX template for CD cover artwork, I can type my own back cover with a tracklist for the self-burnt CD, too.

 

More often than not new releases are exactly that!

 

Although it's not the only reason for the demise of the album, it certainly helped. There's a lot of albums from the 90s and early 2000s that I'd gladly edit down to LP length.

 

I hardly believe that's the reason.

 

No my preference is for a 10 track album with all good numbers above a 20 track album with 10 bad unnecessary songs

 

Sorry for the multiple repeats. My screen was showing it was not posting. Please delete all but one. Thanks!

 

Not at all in my opinion.

Too much good stuff was left off albums back in the day due to time constraints.

 

Blame Norio Ohga of Sony for the length of CDs. And also blame early CD users who complained that there was room for more tunes whenever a disc got released with only 40 or 45 minutes of content.

The Stones' "A Bigger Bang" certainly would have benefited from trimming. But thanks to digital audio technology I can easily trim it myself. Santana IV is another recent example for which I made my own custom chopped version.

 

But then again when The Rolling Stones released Exile On Main Street, they released Sticky Fingers the year before and Goat's Head Soup the year after.

A Bigger Bang has been the only Stones album since 1997, so to answer your original question I don't know.

 

The album won't "die" in that they will stop being made, for a number of reasons. But I think the impact and cultural significance of them was dramatically decreased by thousands upon thousands of albums that ran anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes longer than they would have in the LP era.

Problem is, it's not really a quantifiable thing, it's more psychology. I mean, I think about high-profile albums like Alanis' Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, an album that was never going to live up to the impossible shadow cast by her debut. But would it have been more well-received (especially over time) if it'd been 10-11 killer tracks instead of a 72-minute, 17-track marathon listening session? Same with the last three Stones studio albums, Aerosmith's two 1990's albums (which sold, but aren't particularly well-loved 20 years later, due to the huge amount of filler on both)...the list goes on. That Elton John & Leon Russell album, for instance, took a great concept, and just ran it into the ground for 70+ minutes until the listener was basically numb from it.

Very, very few artists are capable of composing more than 40-45 minutes of truly great music at one time. The CD era just eliminated the need for artists to exercise quality control over their own output. I'm sure in some cases, it seemed like just giving value for money, but I think artistically it had a negative effect on the listener and long-term drove the masses back to singles-oriented listening.

 

This is a very important point. I would restrict it even more to about 30 - 35 minutes as being the limit that even excellent groups / songwriters can manage successfully. Nor is this an issue specific to popular music creators. The number of classical music composers who could compose even an enduring symphony or opera exceeding 30 minutes is also an extremely small almost infinitesimal percentage of all the composers and songwriters of past centuries. (Of course composing a single work over 30 minutes is much harder than separate short songs.)

The answer is not to have bloated albums offered to the public but instead reserve such "extra" material for special editions intended for avid fans of the performer or group.

 

Maybe the question should be - Will the vinyl revival force artists to make shorter records?

If artists want to release their albums on vinyl won't they have to take shorter running time into consideration?

 

I agree the cd caused an excess of filler on each new release.

Perfect cd to me would be 30 minutes with no filler.

 

What I'm infinitely confused is when artists have made shorter, 35-45 minute albums, that STILL get split up into 2LP's for extra cost and listener inconvenience. (I'm explicitly thinking about the latest Jason Isbell and Civil Wars records, and REM's Accelerate)

 

I've been thinking about Soundgarden this week for some reason, and why, despite being a massive Pearl Jam fan (PJ, in my mind, was always their closest musical contemporary), why I generally was always a casual Soundgarden fan, even though objectively I think they're a fantastic band with incredible vocals and musicianship. And this thread may explain why...Superunknown was around 70 minutes and Down On The Upside at least 65.

I owned both those records when I was a kid, but I didn't play them all that often. And now I'm thinking...maybe, even thought I liked the band, I just didn't want to listen to Soundgarden for 70 minutes at once. They're amazing at what they do, but they more or less just do that one thing, and I think subconsciously I rarely felt like I needed that much Soundgarden in one sitting. In my CD days, I was almost always a full-album listener, and I'm wondering if this subsconciously affected my listening habits back in my teenage and college years.

 

That's been happening for years. Probably 90% of the new releases I buy are under 45 minutes long.

 

I think the record companies have a bit to do with that too because they can create CDs with bonus tracks exclusive to certain retailers so they can sell more and at higher prices.