3 ms·

This is what radio edits help with, no? Like Boston's Foreplay / Long Time (although I'm not sure if that has a radio edit, it's what comes to mind).

• ryandrake 3y ago
  Billy Joel sang about the phenomenon. “If you're gonna have a hit you gotta make it fit, so they cut it down to 3:05!”
• dietrichepp 3y ago
  While you might edit a long song down to a radio-friendly length, I think most songs start out short enough to be radio-friendly in the first place. 3 minutes is about the natural for a typical verse-chorus-bridge structure song. Cut out the bridge and the song will probably clock in closer to 2 minutes. These longer songs, like Foreplay / Long Time, have a lot more going on. More ideas. More sections. Dramatic crescendos. Extended instrumental parts. They're harder to write. The standard verse-chorus-bridge structures are popular because it's a really damn good way to write a song.
• ehnto 3y ago
  An interesting nuance of this is dance music, where the orinals can be 7 minutes long with 60+ second intros of just percussion and little musical interest, designed to make them mixable for DJs in clubs. The core of the song may only be 3 minutes, and that is what you get in radio edits. Half my bought music collection comes from when I DJd, and you can't really throw the full length songs on shuffle else you'd spend all your time listening to minute long intros and outros.
  • tomduncalf 3y ago
    I seem to recall reading somewhere that this structure is becoming less common (in some subgenres of dance music at least) because everyone now DJs on CDJs where it’s trivial to loop the intro and control when the song drops in (and use EQ/filter), rather than relying on a long intro with elements coming in.