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Editing for Radio: How Long Should a Song Be?

  • Thread starter Corned Beef and Cabbage
  • Start date

And while the practice is rare, stations have also been known to speed up the tempo of songs to get through about one more song every hour.
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Typical college student jackassery. Pitch is increased to make the records sound better as compared to when you hear them on a competing station. Period.
 
Chicken Smoothie said:
Songs used to be limited to only a couple of minutes. Do five minute cuts hurt station profitability?
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Bad five minute cuts hurt. Great ones don't. Same with three minute cuts. Case closed.
 
Take a look at pop music today. It used to be in the late 90's that everything hovered around 3:30. Right now we've got a range from about 2:50 to 5:00. At the moment, it just depends on the quality of the song (which is how I think it should always be), but tastes do vary over time. Overall, it's what's popular at the moment that determines what length is best.
 
I've actually gone the other way on a couple of songs. I program Oldies/Classic Rock/80's stations. Some of the oldies are under 2 minutes. It makes things difficult, so we edited them to be longer. So The Hawaii 5-0 theme is now 2:18, Sugar Shack is 2:30, and Dang Me is 2:10. Now our music ranges from 2:01 to 9:38 (The Load Out Song/Stay). If a long song ends up in a sweep, I can drop a song or two, or surround them with shorter songs and everything times out. Personally, I can't stand to play the "short version" of songs. It takes a bit more work, but the end result is a better sounding station when we "go long"! If I hear American Pie, I want the whole story (8:29), and Hold Your Head Up (Argent 6:32). Now if I could just find the original release of Crimson & Clover (5:18) instead of that radio edit version (3:30)!
 
JohnAllan said:
If I hear American Pie, I want the whole story (8:29).
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I'll never forget the time I was jocking on a Sunday morning at my first radio station and while getting the Sunday morning programming ready for after 9:00 AM, zoned out and forgot to load a song after the previous song ended. With dead air and in a panic, I grabbed the very first cart I could get my hands on...American Pie - all 8:29 of it. I figured I would have to dump the song at the TOH. Without looking at the clock, as divine Providence would have it, I loaded and started it at 8:51:20 AM. You do the math.

Now back to the topic: I jocked at a station that actually had the 7:20 version of MacArthur Park and we played that in a pretty decent rotation.
 
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