fuck the silent generation

Your smugness is endearing. No one said boundaries set by technology are characteristic of capitalism. Before pianos there was no piano music. Before the invention of musical strings there was no fiddle music.

But capitalism absolutely drives form to fit function through profit motive. The drive to produce new music in pursuit of beauty drove the pursuit of innovation in musical technologies. The drive to profit drove the industry to take every single act that came through the door and tell them they need to cut their songs down or they wouldn’t work with them. The radio played songs and then mixed in advertising so they had a formula for how many songs to play between ads. Every aspect of the rent-seeking behavior of the abusive music industry pushed the 4-minute song despite what tradition, art, or artist had to say.

Of course there are short songs before recordings. Songs were as long as they needed to be. But the 4-minute norm was established for profit.

The very concept of liking songs based on their length is itself highly suspect unless you are some sort of temporal aesthetician.

Not really. 1-2 minute songs were also common before the 1960s, like you said because of physical records. For example, the longest song on Elvis’ first album from 1956 is 2:43 long, while his 1969 “From Elvis in Memphis” has 2:35 for the shortest song.

33 revolutions-per-minute LongPlay vinyls can house roughly 22 minutes of music on each side, and the concept of an album was rare until the late 50s/early 60s. Many 1930s releases etc. had one song per vinyl, and ran at very high speeds like 78 rpm.

Depending on the artists’ intentions, you could have like eight two-minute songs, like for example on the 1982 punk record Milo Goes to College by the Descendants, or have a 22 minute long song on one side as was not uncommon in progressive rock or prog electronic or in the 1970s more in general. For example, Autobahn by Kraftwerk.

With the advent of CDs, that have managed to replace the Vinyl as the main data carrying device for music starting in the late 1980s, the time restriction was lifted in favor of a data restriction. Longer albums became a possibility. I own a 1988 CD copy of 1981’s Speak & Spell by Depeche Mode and with the bonus tracks for that release, the running time is of 61 instead of 42 minutes.

Nevertheless the 3 to 5 minute song length remained standard until the late 2010s probably. Part of it is certainly due to commercial radio, needing songs that won’t take up advertisement space and won’t make the listeners switch the channel because they don’t like the song and it’s been running for 6 minutes already. This is also a reason why radio playlists are so stale for the most parts, as stations compete with each other over ad revenue. Risk can make a company go bankrupt.

As for why songs and albums for wide audiences are getting shorter - Probably TikTok, as well as a general trend among zoomer music listeners and commercial music producers following the money trail. There’s a few other aspects, but I am not sure of them, so I won’t make those claims.

the songs i’m talking about are mainly electronic and it’s subgeres

I like Queen but the rest are torture to me lol

the joke is they’re all long and old people listen to them

me neither, i just wanted to shitpost 😩

Which is funny cause deathcore had lots of 10+ minute songs.

I outright refuse to even try full songs that get blasted out of TikTok in 10 second hooks anymore. I’ve been disappointed too many times already.