What would you say is the length of the average modern song?
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3 minutes. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus.
A band called the Minutemen, who are known for playing the theme of Jackass, had most of their albums last 18 minutes long, and consisted of 18 songs each, ironically. And several great stoner and metal bands have songs that last over 10 minutes.
It doesn’t matter how long a song is, as long as you can keep it interesting.
I agree. Three sounds about right when it comes to popular music.
According to Yahoo! Answers the average is 3 1/2 minutes. The average of my MP3 library is 4 minutes 10 seconds. Without selecting genre and defining “modern” better that’s as close as you can get.
It’s only 3.5 minutes because there aren’t anymore bands like Floyd or Zeppelin who had an average of 20 min/song.
I’ve asked Last.fm for an answer. I’ll let you know if they reply.
If you’ve not heard of it before, Last.fm is a service that catalogues basically all music worldwide. They have track times for everything, so it’s possible they have the average to hand.
Does “average” mean giving more popular songs a stronger vote? I tend to think that “pop” music and the Top 40 are around this 3 minute mark to remain in the “catchy” category, but in my experience the slightly lesser listened to bands seem to average longer. Death cab, The Flaming Lips, Radiohead, etc. I bet average around 6… Seems to me, the lesser known the band, the more lengthy their songs are. Like @Pol_is_aware said, there are long-winded bands, like Mogwai whose songs are like 14 minutes long. There may be more of these lesser known bands with longer songs than there are short catchy popular hits. I guess we’ll never know…
Pop, radio stuff, 3–3:30 seems right
most of the music I like(lesser known or older rock, 90s rap, amoung others) seem to be around 5–7 minutes.
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