WS More or Less: Why Albums are Getting Longer
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2017
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chris Brown’s latest album is stuffed with so many songs it runs at a sprawling two hours and twenty minutes. It’s only the latest in a string of lengthy album releases that includes artists like Drake, The Weeknd and Lil B. More or Less speaks to Hugh McIntyre, a music journalist who has found out that a numerical change in the way the album charts are measured is tempting artists into making longer albums.
We also talk to Marc Hogan, a senior writer at Pitchfork, about a number that is changing the sound of pop music. You can find more of Marc Hogan's writing on pitchfork.com
Presenter: Jordan Dunbar Producer: Xavier Zapata
(Chris Brown performs onstage at 2017 BET Awards. Credit: Paras Griffin/Getty Images for BET)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less. We're your statistical guide to the world around us and I'm Jordan Dunbar. The American astronomer Edwin Hubble |
| 0:45.4 | uncovered evidence that the universe is expanding. Well this week we've |
| 0:50.7 | discovered a phenomenon that sits a similarly cosmic paradigm. The pop album is expanding. |
| 0:58.0 | Barring the long noodling prog rock experiments of the 70s, most albums used to be short, usually nine or 12 songs long. Michael Jackson's thriller, The Best Selling Album of All Time, according to the Guinness Book of Records, has only nine tracks, running at just |
| 1:14.8 | over 42 minutes. Here's the more or less reduced version of Thriller, with each track running |
| 1:21.0 | at two seconds. So beat it, a bit a jay, |
| 1:33.4 | tell that is human nature. |
| 1:36.4 | I'm pretty young, |
| 1:38.0 | because you will always be the lady in my life. Well, Chris Brown has ripped that all up. He's released an album that's longer than |
| 1:48.8 | Francis Ford Coppola's epic War film Apocalypse Now. |
| 1:53.0 | Chris Brown's heartbreak on a full moon is 45 tracks long and runs at a sprawling 2 hours and 38 minutes. |
| 2:03.5 | Here's the more or less reduced version of Heartbreak |
| 2:06.6 | in a full moon, again with each track running at two seconds. |
| 2:09.9 | This is not the lost and found. I must slow it down because ain't no speed. |
| 2:15.0 | Just to put it tonight. |
... |
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