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Originally Posted by blots
The 15 tracks thing was kind of just a general rule, tracks don't really mean anything. Locust has very short songs, and as for Husker Du, Zen Arcade easily justifies its length for me. Le Scrawl's entire discography "Too Short to Ignore" is 66 songs at something like 55 minutes... There are a lot of very slow bands, or very sprawling bands who might only fit two songs in that time frame.
I don't really understand what use extra time is, other than taking up time. In many cases I see the album as a whole to be just as important as each song, so it's not still getting the other stuff, it's getting inconsistency and mediocrity. The amount of material is not really what you're buying, it's the work as a whole...otherwise just go to a dollar bin and buy 10 CDs rather than one, it's a much better deal. Music doesn't really end with the start and stop buttons anyway, it just seems irrelevant...the work is either worth it or it's not. Compilations are a slightly different issue, but usually the length will depend on the goal, if you're trying to get an overview of an artist's entire career it makes sense that there will be more material. Though these tend to be an excellent example of poor choices in the tracklisting being a detriment to the work as a whole. The only reason I say 30-40 minutes is because that's what a lot of, shall we say pop, artists seem have in them. When something is great it doesn't matter how long it is, and greatness isn't so scarce that I need mediocrity to take up the extra time in between.
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Yeah I get what you're saying. I just listen to music differently I suppose. I rarely look at a CD as a whole unless it is meant to be looked at as a whole. Usually I assume a band just writes songs and cuts the ones that sound out of place, but doesn't work them into a single entity. I'm someone who will buy a CD for a few songs, and just think of the others as a bonus to give me my money's worth. I think of of it like, I can either have 30 minutes of great music and then nothing, or 30 minutes of great music interspersed with 30 minutes of variable music. Sometimes it's another great 30 minutes, sometimes it's a dissappointing 30 minutes. But it's still better than nothing.
Like the CD I bought today cost me $20 (it's an import) and is an hour long (excluding the obnoxious 15 minute bonus crap I mentioned). I bought it based on a single song, but I would not have paid that for the song alone. I paid it knowing that I would get 55 more minutes of potentially good/potentially bad music. It's better than paying $20 for a single song. Fortunately, the whole thing kicks ass.