Forgotten benefit of CD: More music per album

[Flint]

Some of you may not remember, but back before CDs were an option most LPs were about 35 to 45 minutes long. I remember being blown away that albums like Genesis's "A Trick of the Tail" were a whopping 50 minutes long while using one LP - but longer LPs paid the price of lower audio quality and two disk LP albums cost quite a bit more and often had tunes you didn't really like because they had to fill two complete LPs, or be at least 60 to 80 minutes long - which was difficult for a band to create that much great music on each album.

Then CDs came along and at first all we got was high quality sound, greater portability, better reliability, and a huge ease of use - at least until the artists and producers realized they could easily put 60 minutes on a single CD. At first they stuck bonus tracks on CD versions of the LPs, usually stuff like a B-Side, cover song, or alternate mix of the single(s) off the albums. But, in time they started writing albums which had good content which could completely fill 55 minutes to 70 minutes without getting boring or dull.

The "progressive" rock artists and many of the dance music artists really took advantage of all the available time and made some incredible music. We also got live albums which contained the entire concert, instead of just the best 45 minutes from the show. Things really did change, and the artists changed along with it.

Sure, to this day there are still "albums" being sold which contain only 35 to 40 minutes of content, but prog bands are churning out amazing albums with individual songs that last as much as 50 minutes.

I was reminded of this since I am listening to my favorite old LPs which I either cannot get on CD or which hold a very special place in my heart. It is strange to think a full 23 minutes per side was a "long" album.

Crazy.

 

[Flint]

Another reason I posted the above tonight is I have started ripping my classical music to files on my music drive for the first time. Up until now, I only ripped pop, rock, jazz, country, folk and other similar genres, mostly because my software didn't handle playing a single album of classical music well when there were other versions of the same pieces (sometimes I would play, say, Beethoven's 9th Symphony which I have four versions of, and the player would play the first movement from each of the four versions before playing the second movement of each of the four versions, and so on). I am using different software now.

But, as it pertains to this topic, it is impossible not to notice that CD versions of albums released on LP before 1983 and some others released before about 1990 are very limited in length - limited to about 45 minutes. While damn near every CD released after 1990 is over an hour in length.

It is like digging through the strata under an ancient city and seeing how an entire art form changed almost overnight because of a single technological advancement.