David V Stewart, always a great source for thoughtful content and commentary, dropped a video yesterday explaining how the format switch from vinyl record to CD in the '80s resulted in a decline in album quality. If you're like me, and music is something you love but know little about, David's video is worth a watch.
In summary, albums on vinyl were limited to two 23-minute sides. Often you would listen to one side of a record, encouraging continuity and/or contrast among the songs that composed that side. CDs, on the other hand, can hold nearly 80 minutes of music. When listening to a CD, you can use the skip buttons to hear your favorite songs.
As with most new trends, the downside of CDs wouldn't be felt until years later. As a rival to vinyl, cassette tapes owned the '80s and didn't begin to fade until the early '90s. David notes around that time bands and their producers started to stuff their albums with filler to make them longer, because why leave "wasted" space on an 80-minute CD? The end result was albums with watered-down quality. Metallica's Load famously boasted 78 minutes and 59 seconds of music, which was probably 30 minutes too long.
The constraints of the vinyl record used to force bands and their producers to tighten up the songwriting and select the best material from a recording session. The CD does not impose that kind of discipline.
Look at the top-selling and top-rated albums during vinyl's heyday. Led Zeppelin I, II, III, and IV were all under 45 minutes. Dark Side of the Moon? Forty-three minutes. (My favorite Pink Floyd album is Wish You Were Here, at 44 minutes.) Pet Sounds was a paltry 35 minutes. Michael Jackson's Thriller and Back in Black both clocked in at 42 minutes. You hardly ever hear anyone complain these albums are too short. What they are is good.
As I said in an earlier post, time is an essential constraint of any media. Because media formats evolved quickly and shed material boundaries (books to ebooks, albums to iTunes, movies and TV to Internet streaming), creators have the freedom to put out entertainment of any length they want.
As with any new freedom, it's easily abused. Excesses in books, music, and movies prove by the blessing of hard boundaries. It's better to err on the side of being too short, leaving the audience wanting more, than too long, and overstaying your welcome. Assume the listener (or reader, in my case) has something marginally less important to do than pay attention to your very best effort. That will keep your quality up.
Aside: Cassette tapes, at 30 minutes per side, matched well with vinyl records at the cost of lower quality. When I was little, my dad had more cassette tapes than any other format. He would listen to the A side on his way to work and the B side on his way home, then switch the tapes that night. When I turned 16 and he gave me his car, one of the first things I did was burn my CDs to tapes so I could listen to them on the road. It wasn't until the summer after I turned 17 that I realized installing a CD player in the dashboard was an option. All my friends and I had CD players installed in our cars in the span of a few months. Best Buy doesn't offer that service anymore, and I doubt it ever will again.
As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.
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