After listening to Merry Go Round’s ‘merry go round is dead’ album this weekend, which clocks in at 16 songs, I had a thought: What is the ideal number of songs on an album for most people? And furthermore, what about singles?
Personally, I find 13-16+ too long, but 8-10 too short. My ideal album length falls into 11-12 songs. A higher number of tracks always seems to leave a disjointed taste in my mouth.
As for singles, I think a 3 song single is best. Not a fan of say, DEG’s release pattern of one new song and the rest being filler tracks, but I find that a 4 songs single will usually have 1-2 lost to history if the band continues long enough. Might as well just do a mini at that point.
Lately I’ve been listening to longer albums, which is very unusual for me. It really depends on the style of music but my ideal length (or expectation) is generally around 30 to 45 minutes if we’re talking full-length albums. This is for ‘regular’ popular music subgenres (most rock, metal, hip-hop etc.). 45 to 55 minutes is pushing it so it really has to be some excellent material all across the board. If it’s some out-there experimental album that justifies it being an hour or a lot more, I’m fine with that too, if I’m in that kind of headspace.
I’m a very album (or mini album) oriented person, so if we’re talking about a single it really has to have at least 2 but preferably 3 tracks, all individual songs (if there are intros or remixes or alternative versions on top of that that’s okay too but I rarely ever listen to such things). Again, this is only for popular music, and not like Acid Mothers Temple where one track can be 40 minutes long, haha.
I don’t care much about length, but the content of an album. Ideally an album should have between eight and twelve songs, not counting intros, interludes, and the like. And I don’t really like albuns that are mostly comprised of singles and older stuff. At least, ~65% should be new material.
Most of my favorite visual kei albums track ~45min without SE tracks and roughly an hour, with. I think that pretty much checks out for album-length in general, averaging across all genres.
If you want a fun answer, for J-pop and VGM anthologies I can power through 10~12 hours in one listen, but I have to be doing something productive/physically demanding at the same time, since I’d otherwise feel like I’m wasting my hours.
Yeah i think im with the majority by saying it depends on a lot of different things, but to keep things simple im going to stick with rock and metal and say, for me a nice album length is 40-50mins. UNLESS it’s a compilation of singles/EPs or whatever then that is acceptable to be longer. I also like a lot of dsbm and funeral doom albums which tend to have absurdly long songs and for me an album in this style doesnt feel a slog being over an hour long, some nearly 80mins! Just because if the songs are good, the slow flow of things doesnt get dull and you can get dragged into the atmosphere completely which would be difficult to achieve probably if each song was only 4-5mins long.
Full album should at least have 10 tracks. Come one not even a double digit feels like a mini album… I guess 12 to 16 tracks is ideal… up to 20 would be okay.
Length 45 to 60 mins. I want to be occupied for a bit if I put on an album. 30 mins is over in a blink of the eye.
I’m already the type of person who prefers to listen to a whole album all the way through, so I probably have a higher tolerance for longer albums. ‘Fear of a Blank Planet’ by Porcupine Tree is 50 minutes, ‘The Way of All Flesh’ by Gojira is 75 minutes…
I care more about the album not having filler and about it being sequenced well than I do about actual length. I’ve heard 25-minute EPs that felt like a slog to get through and I’ve heard 80-minute albums that left me wanting more when they were done. Make the album take me on a journey, and the length won’t matter too much to me