tiktok brain take

Death to America

Such bullshit. This is what capitalism does to music. The only reason the 4 minute song became a thing is because of physical limits of records around the time radio became popular and in order to make the most money all songwriters had to conform. Prior to the 1920s songs were as long as they needed to be.

I am a prog rock fan so we are diametrically opposed beings. Some of my favourite songs involve a slow progression

Hard disagree. 1-2 minutes is barely enough for a proper intro to present a motif.

My favorite songs are all over 11 minutes

you just wanted recommendations of long-ass songs

What type of genre is so bad at songwriting they can't make one that lasts over 2 mins?

This is a sign of the decline of cardio. You libs simply cannot sustain the requisite 23 minutes straight of crunking for good music.

The perfect length of a song is however long the song needs to be

There are rap songs I fw that are perfectly fine being 1:30, good hook, verse, repeat hook and out, they don’t need to force another verse in there just bc of some arbitrary format that used to be normalized by the radio/expectations from older music. Hell a lot of hardcore songs are like this too and have been for ages before tiktok.

And on the other hand, colors by btbam is my favorite metal album so. Idk hate being a centrist but I think both are fine and good where applicable.

(my three hour doom metal playlist with 14 songs)

TIL, Bohemian Rhapsody is 3-6 perfect songs

Tell me you're a grindcore fan without saying you're a grindcore fan

TikTok trends have already made music mostly irrelevant if it can't be blasted out in a 5 second clip, so I say to further shortening songs.

1 to 2 minutes

Like for the guitar solo? Yeah, at least that

The perfect song length is 20-30 minutes.

One per side, we have to go back

I tend to prefer 5 minute songs, especially as I tend to listen to the same ones for multiple days at a time.

Post rock begs to disagree

My favorite song of all time is around 12 minutes long so I'd have to disagree

Counterpoint: nah

Hard disagree. Jazz songs are very long, and listening to jazz live the songs would be long as musicians would be given chances to improvise for longer periods. These songs would be cut down to 3-4 min to fit them all onto a record, which had limited recording ability. Even though I grew up after the album era had arguably ended, this 3-4 min length was so ingrained that most people considered it the ideal song length. I don’t want to be an old person yelling about newer trends, but it does seem like tiktok and maybe just our collective loss of attention span is cutting song lengths down even further.

I think it’s wrong to talk about ideal song length in an era when you can literally upload a song of any length you want. The song should be long enough to get the artist’s point across. If that’s 1-2 minutes then fine, I love hardcore and many of those bands keep within these extremely short song lengths. But I also love a song that stretches on and take a while to build. To some extent the 3-4 min song length was necessary since that was the limit of our technology at the time - unless you wanted to fill an entire record side with 1 or 2 songs (and even then you would at some point come up against a hard limit). But now we don’t have those technological limitations, so our song lengths should reflect that and be more variable rather than conforming to some sort of ideal length.

1-2 minutes you're only just getting into it, I'd feel robbed listening to a track and really loving it, only for it to end after a minute or so.

I'd like to hear some examples where a song can build and evolve and end in such a small amount of time where you don't think it's rushed or missing something.

I can think of some tracks this short that are great, but they only really work in the context of the whole album.

Personally I think 6-8 minutes is a sweet spot of song length. But of course a song really needs as long as it needs and to artificially have it be longer or shorter is dumb

objectively correct opinion

N O

And only has 4 notes

INNA GADDA DA VIDA BABY