I know we've mentioned it in different posts, but I've never seen one post dedicated to showing how much the creation of full albums changed each time the dominant format changes.

Like...you know how vinyls albums were for many artists...they would make the very first song on it the hit record? Then, with tapes, you started seeing "intros" to projects...or was that more when CDs came?

How much has the average length changed? I know songs were longer in the 70's and early 80's, but it felt like the full albums would remain under 60 minutes. Not sure for tape, but CDs are 80. I notice that most MP3 albums still remain under 80 min...but I see that changing shortly, since there's no limit for a MP3.

I just read a comment last week about how Janelle Monae's album has skits that are separate tracks, and it was like "who does this in the MP3 era?" or something along those lines. And did skits come along on CD's, because they were easy to skip right past, vs forcing the listener to listen to them?

I've also heard that when tapes were dominant...they made sure that the first song on the B-Side was a banger. Was this usually the case?

What are some examples of famous albums and how their layout was made based on the common medium of the time?

supposedly tighter and shorter.

Then when 33 1/3 rpm records came along, Jazz musicians could supposedly take longer solo's and what not. Be less constricted.

Don't know exactly what 8 tracks did that caused a different approach than then vinyl recordings.

CD's made artists sort of move away from side A, side B thing a little - supposedly, most famously Prince's "Lovesexy" CD (see I didn't say album) . Though I don't think that fully happened until mp3's became more dominant over CD's - and when cassettes were finally phased out.


Got in my peace, yup

Ice Cube had the "Life" and "Death" side...but was the sound of each side usually different? Like, party tracks on Side A, slow tracks on Side B?

>Ice Cube had the "Life" and "Death" side...but was the sound
>of each side usually different? Like, party tracks on Side A,
>slow tracks on Side B?

No.... youve never listened to a record side a and b? cmon

the albums according to the sides?

Every record I can think of off hand...I can't really tell you much except they usually put the hit records/singles as the very first song on each side.

and other funk records like brass construction...i cant really say theres a formula... i can remember always flipping sides back and forth to hear songs i wanted to hear...

And the album sides had distinct identities.

The A sides were the more up-tempo, typical dance numbers in the Parliament mold.

The B sides are where he got into the funk slow jams that George was hesitant to put on Parliament albums.

glad i got to experience the lesson when i was younger and it was a place where i could learn some shit... i think this is a great thread and i'm obsessed with sequencing on albums... but i was born in '85 and wasn't really *into* music until the CD format came around.. a little history from ppl who lived it and know more about the evolution/philosophy behind the correlation of format and sequencing would be really awesome... i'd love to hear you expound on the subject (instead of what you did)

side 2 of "thriller" is a monster, whereas side 1 is just... eh.
side 1 of EWF "all 'n all" is crazy, whereas side 2 has to grow on you.
side 1 of "what's going on" coheres better than side than side 2.
side 2 of Abby road is legendary because of the 15 minute merely at the end of it.


it's all subjective.
but it did make people pay more attention to sequencing.



>Ice Cube had the "Life" and "Death" side...but was the sound
>of each side usually different? Like, party tracks on Side A,
>slow tracks on Side B?

And switching a record breaks up the flow...so it gives you a chance to kinda reset...whether the previous song was slow, or just a different type of vibe. I figured they played around with that somehow.

In the beginning there was no means of duplication, so a group would perform the same song ten times for ten cylinders. Each one of those cylinders being unique performances. I think the time was limited to like two minutes. Eventually they were duplication methods but like with cassettes each version degraded the quality so you could only get 100 dups. So bands would still record more than one master take.

early recording was very constrained and uniquely different from the live thing, even though it was meant to capture the live thing. when you think about composers prior to that making pieces for live performances that could extend for full hour long concerts a two minute piece of music was definitely a shift.

It was the limiting of the recording format that helped define cnsumable music not by listener desires necessarily.

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tracks that were album tracks were at the end and in the CD era where you had to have a heavyweight 15 rounds usually track 11-16 was the dead end tracks.

i miss the old days because acts before the cd era had a limited amount of time and they got the best stuff on their period.

8 track era had interludes earth,wind and fire, isley brothers did it and it would click over rick james had that as well if a track was more than 5 minutes long.

i feel the CD and Mp3 era made things unnecessary longer and its cost alot of filler material which truly sounds like 2nd and 3rd tier tracks which ain't got no place on any album.


with albums, tapes and cds folks always went to that one track or two nothing changed their.

i still groove with a tape player because the sound bangs and its what i like.

in hip hop the money tracks were front and center as well nothing different their either.

everybody knows the hot song and then everybody knows the filler section.

you had to have a bumping first track on side a and a killer track on side b

Album lengths in the U.S. and the UK used to be different. The U.S. standard in the 50's and 60's was between 11 and 13 songs, with most of them being right in the middle. Song lengths catered to what used to be the length of a song on a 10" 78 rpm recording, which was 2:30 to 3:30. Thus, it was that time length that became what represented pop radio, but usually a pop hit was 2:55 or less. By the mid-60's, song lengths for pop songs grew longer by a minute, which seemed exhausting. By 1967, your typical song gaining airplay on FM radio was 3 to 5 minutes, although what was on FM generally would never get airplay on AM radio, where pop was the king. You might hear the freaky stuff on FM, but you would never hear pop or easy listening.

I still stand by this, but the length of an album is anything longer than 26 minutes and 59 seconds. That was often the length of most albums in the 50's and 60's, which was 11 and 13 songs. In time, albums grew to be 30 to 35 minutes. Then artists pushed themselves to go between 35 to 40, and eventually 45 minutes, which was the norm for albums in the late 1960's and throughout the 1970's. Also keep in mind that this is all from a vinyl perspective, and any tape formats still catered to the record.

As the cassette grew in popularity, people liked the fact you could make a mix tape that was 60 minutes, which for a generation meant "an album plus a few B-sides", a mentality that still exists with older albums and CD reissues, the bonus tracks. By the late 70's/early 80's, albums on cassette started to be between 40 to 50 minutes. By the mid-80's, they were between 45 to 55. As the compact disc found its way in, the CD catered to the cassette and the record, in that order. The primary issue was that you didn't have to walk to your stereo to flip a record. The functionality of a record also allowed producers, engineers, and the artist to program the music in a certain way so that it would sound *and* feel good. In rock and pop, the first song was generally the loudest track, the most exciting. The last song on a side was usually a ballad, or something more mellow. That's due to how a record is designed. The closer the groove gets to the center, you have to compromise volume and dynamics, thus the reason why ballads were reserved as a side closer, or the end of the album.

Formatting it for two sides of the cassette was faithful to the record, the "two side" mentality but you didn't have to deal with vinyl dynamics. However, since vinyl was still the norm, most albums were designed with a record in mind. The same can be said for early pressings of CD's, where peak levels were low. They were still thinking in terms of vinyl, so while volumes were quieter on earlier CD, some will tell you that they sounded better, especially with CD's made after 1997 or so, when mastering techniques and brickwall limiting became an issue for making digital sound "better".

What the CD essentially changed is how an album was formatted. The level of pacing changed, for one didn't have to think in terms of creating two distinct sides, or "part 1" and "part 2" of an audio program. It was one continuous presentation. Now, in the era of the 78, albums were meant to represent, to some degree, a live performance. Albums back then were designed in a way where the first song was "the banger", and the last song would move you to want to experience the music again. While the compact disc removed the need to create two distinct sides/moods, removing it also left behind quality music and album programming, something I feel has been lost to some degree in the randomness of the custom playlist.

With the CD, it was possible for everyone to obtain a high quality version of the hit. With CD-R's, you could just burn what you wanted. With iPod's, you get what you want and that's it. While some may have felt that album tracks were nothing but "fatique", the song was placed on the album for a reason, even though the general consensus is that "anything that's not a hit is filler". Unfortunately, a lot of artists make way too much filler in order to sell product, so all they're worth is "the hit". See Beyonce for references.

There are still artists who create music with the old sensibility of album programming, and that still keeps true to the power of album integrity. Sadly, I think it's a dying art and yes, I call it art because it requires someone to design a program that is seemed suitable for the listener, to give them a certain amount of impact at the right time, and lighten up when needed. Arguably, it shows the power of the compilation, the "greatest hits" album, the soundtrack. Less people are willing to sit through an album, but they also lose out on a presentation that the artist felt was important enough to release.







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in the center of the record before.

I know they existed to a lesser extent with vinyl LPs, but they were really prominent in the late 80s through a few years ago.

Also, some albums had extra tracks on cassettes because you had the potential for a longer run time. Sex Packets and Stillmatic come to mind.

is a fairly recent development in pop music.

Outside of jazz, and maybe folk, through the 1950s and early 1960s LPs were an afterthought to record labels: compilations of singles with some filler to capitalize on a singer's popularity.

It was only about 1965 and the following few years that things evolved so that
-albums could spawn singles, rather than the other way around, and
-pop albums could sell commercially in huge numbers to rival singles... I believe LPs only outsold 45s for the first time in 1968, though I'm not sure if that statistic is in $ figures or # of units.
-there was a radio market that played LPs (the emergence of FM, which John got into a bit)

While it's cliche, Bob Dylan's commercial breakthrough and the Beatles' 1965 run were extremely influential in the development of pop musicians' desire to make albums into cohesive artistic statements rather than collections of pop songs, and convinced labels to allow them to do so. Whether that was a good thing or not probably depends on the band/record/label.

Another thought on the importance of FM radio: since the sound was better than AM, I wonder if the fidelity available over the radio pushed bands & producers to better sonic standards? While a lot of us prefer a little grit or crunch, there's no denying that by the mid-70s studio recordings were of a cleanness unimaginable even 15years before.

To reiterate, tapes didn't change the landscape at all... in fact, it was frustrating to have 2 or 3 minutes of blank tape at the end of side 1 or 2 b/c the other side was longer.

CDs didn't start changing things until the early 1990s, when people started saying 'hey, we have 80 minutes available, we've gotta use it all' - to the point where fans would complain if an album was only 32 minutes. Again, whether that was a good thing is up for debate. Hidden tracks too. I don't think the evolution of skits as an important part of certain types of albums had anything to do with the CD format.

Now as far as digital, the long-term effect will continue to be the de-emphasis of the album. So the wayI look at it, the album was only about a 40-year period (say, 1965-2005) out of our 110 years or so of commercially recorded music.

from 78rpm vinyl,
to 78rpm & 33rpm vinyl,
to 45rpm vinyl & 33rpm vinyl, & reel-to-reel,
to 45rpm vinyl, 33rpm vinyl, reel-to-to-reel, 8-track, & 12inch vinyl,
to 45rpm vinyl, 33rpm vinyl, reel-to-reel, 12inch vinyl, & cassette,
to 45rpm vinyl, 33rpm vinyl, reel-to-reel, 12inch vinyl, cassette, 10inch vinyl, & DAT,
to 45rpm vinyl, 33rpm vinyl, reel-to-reel, 12inch vinyl, cassette, 10inch vinyl, DAT, & cd,
to 45rpm vinyl, 33rpm vinyl, reel-to-reel, 12inch vinyl, 10inch vinyl, DAT, & cd,
to 45rpm vinyl, 33rpm vinyl, 12inch vinyl, 10inch vinyl, cd, & digital format.

If you notice vinyl hasn't went away at all, it's not the major medium but it's still pressed up and sold around the world as one of the three formats used.