How much does the length of an album factor into your enjoyment? Over the years I find myself enjoying shorter albums more. Like 30-40 minutes for me. Not to say that I won't listen to a long album, but there's just something about a short album without any filler or uninteresting moments.

All depends on the band, some bands work great with shorter formats and others work better in longer.

I don't seen why a length should be a factor if it's all quality and works as a whole cause there are plenty of albums that are long and don't contain filler.

All personal preference.

my personal opinion: around 40 minutes is perfect length, or about 9-10 songs of average length. Any longer than that and you start to get bored, no matter how good the band/album is. Now granted, there are plenty of bands who have gotten away with longer albums, especially if the tracks are longer on average.

I'd say around 50 minutes or so. Fairly short and succinct, but just long enough to pack in a heavy epic or two.

Depends on the genre, really. Often times 30 - 35 minutes works for something like slam death metal, or something that's really fast and intense, such as Revenge or Blasphemy. 40 - 45 minutes works for almost anything as it gives enough time to reach a level of depth while not wearing out any kind of welcome. 50 - 60 minutes works well enough for something either doomy, takes a long time to conjure an atmosphere or simply has a lot of things to do. Anything that exceeds 60 minutes had better be bloody brilliant though to retain my attention.

In general though, I would say 40 minutes. That can be a sweet mark for almost anything.

Edit: The worst would be something like a double album with both CDs being over an hour long. Ain't nobody got time for dat.

Obviously it depends on the genre and how much I like the band, but 40 minutes is the sweet spot for me, generally speaking. It's just long enough to keep my attention and leave me satisfied. For example, Blind Guardian's albums up through Somewhere Far Beyond. Around 50 minutes is doable, but once an album hits an hour I start to get tired of it. One exception that comes to mind is Cruelty and the Best, and album that I don't think has any weak spots (besides Venus in Fear!). If the songs are good enough, I don't really notice the time go by, like with a good movie. Some albums can climb past an hour without losing steam at any point, but in many cases, I find longer albums tend to have more mediocrity than shorter albums. I'd rather a band concentrate on packing their best music into a 40 minute album. Then again there are bands that specialize in longer songs or epic themes, like Opeth or Bal-Sagoth, and it works for them. There are a lot of exceptions, but I personally like the middle ground of 40 minutes.

most of the best albums are 40 minutes or less. theres a few exception of course but generally the longer the album the more bloated it will be.

Great music is like great writing; the masters know that what is being said is much more important than how much is being said. Sure, sometimes a Tolkien-esque epic is a nice change of pace, but I'd happily stick with Hemingway types for the vast majority of my listening.

Meaning: if your album is longer than 55 minutes, it better be a god damn masterpiece.

Some bands really stretch out tracks too much or try to add tonnes of filler so a EP is a album rather then just a EP but it really varies...

Length is definitely a factor. 38 minutes, no more, no less. (see: Wolf's Return)
Look at Cage's Hell Destroyer for example, if you take any song from it and listen to it on it's own it's great and you think "man, I wish there would be a whole album full of songs this great". And there is, a 78 minutes long album. It's torture sitting through it. I've done it once, I do not wish to do it again. It just goes on and on and on...

Some doom albums manage to fill 50-55 minutes. Some prog metal albums can get away with being longer too, but look at EoS Crimson, 40 minutes! Had it been longer it would certainly not have been better.

Perfect length for most of my kind of albums are 40-55 minutes or so. But I do enjoy a really long, epic album if it's like Melechesh's Epigenesis or Maiden's Final Frontier - a good experience when you have the time to soak it all in, ya know.

A few people have said it: 40 minutes is the sweet spot.

Great bands can manage to release an album anywhere between 30 to 45 minutes (or 28, if you're Slayer ) but once you get over 45 minutes, you better have a damn good reason.

At over 50 minutes, it's a good bet you should have left something off. Even legendary albums like Powerslave and Operation Mindcrime could have benefitted from some trimming.

I don't think I've ever complained about an album being too short. Take something like Gorgoroth's Antichrist which is 26 minutes long or so and is an incredibly complete piece. I have no problem with short albums and more bands should try them rather than dragging out their songs to excessive lengths. There's no perfect length, obviously, but I hate it when bands feel the need to fill up the whole CD (or worse still, try and fill two of 'em!).

This, with one particular addition; the longer an album is, the more varied it has to be. This might just be a personal quirk of mine, but when listening to, say, Gotsu Totsu Kotsu's Legend of Shadow, I can't shake the feeling that, while every single song is excellent on its own, by the time the seventh one or so starts playing, it all blurs together, mostly because the formula for every piece is so damn similar. Mind you, it's a terrific formula, yet at the same time, many other formulaic bands manage to write engaging albums partially because they're not over a fucking hour long. Just look at Motorhead.

Agreed. An album could be <10 or >100 minutes, as long as I like everything on it then I'd say the length doesn't factor in for me.

It depends on the style of music for me. Anything from 30 minutes to 1 hour and 30 minutes is doable depending on the style and quality of the work. Heck, I know a few releases where a double CD works well also and that means over 2 hours of music. But I'd rather not listen to a long punk or thrash album. And a doom album clocking in at around 30 minutes is probably way to short to accomplish anthing. Virgin Steele's House of Atreus part II works well for the whole two discs. Dark Funerals Vobiscum Satanas clocks in at about 30 minutes and it also works very well. However, I do think albums can be to short. I can't think of any time when I decide to listen to an EP for example. 20 minutes of music is way to short to do anything for me. The songs can of course be awesome but I rarely seem to be able to get over the feeling that the whole is lacking.

My heartfelt thanks go out to all bands who print the song lengths on the back of their CDs. I don't want to spend 15$+ for anything less than 45-50 minutes of music.

You cheap, ridiculous bastard.

Oh c'mon, I'm the only one who thinks that way? I call b.s. on that!

But to get back on topic, I usually prefer a lesser number of long songs - such as say a Drudkh album - over the same totalt length but spread across a crapload of short songs, such as Eluveitie might do. It's just easier to keep track of fewer tunes when trying to absorb an album.

If you had $15 to spend and the choice of album X which is half an hour of ass-kickery, or album Y which is an hour long but sorta mediocre; would you consider the latter more worthy of your cash? I suppose your reply will be "I'd save the money until I find a better hour long album", but still.

I'll admit that when I was younger and relying on saved up lunch money (sneaky bastard) to buy CDs, I was more inclined to buy longer albums, though it wasn't usually a deal breaker. I did pass on buying Deathcrush because it was priced the same as the other CDs. That shop was not cheap and for the typical price of one album there I could buy two albums elsewhere. I probably threw the money at a couple of unremarkable albums I just liked the cover art of, whereas Deathcrush turned out to be a favourite of mine.

It realy depends on the band/music for me. My album length I prefer overall is about 45 minutes, but thats not saying longer is bad. I do have a short attention span with long songs, though. I love Moonsorrow, but I space off during their songs since they are so long, so its hard to stay interested/build up the excitement to listen to a full album of theirs.

Length really depends on the album. There are some 50+ minute albums that work well for me, while others might find them tedious. Filosofem is one of those albums that some people complain about Rundgang... in particular. But the album is really one that I prefer to relax to and that I enjoy the atmosphere of, so I really don't notice the length nor think that it drags on longer than need be. Stratovarius' Nemesis is another that I don't really notice the length of and every track deserves to have made it onto the album.

But for the majority of full-lengths 40-45 minutes is in the realm of just right from my perspective. Many with 50+ minutes lengths tend to contain at least a couple of filler tracks. That isn't always the case, but often by the last few tracks such albums start to lose momentum and so my attention goes with it. Running Wild's The Rivalry is one of those cases where there are some pretty great songs early on but once you move past Return of the Dragon things are pretty hit and miss. 50+ minute versions that include bonus tracks have a similar effect where regardless of how solid the album was, not only do the extra tracks break up the flow but diminish the album's conclusion.

Agreed!
Love the length of Gorgoroth's album!
Growing up in the 80's most albums were around 40 minutes!
That was awesome!
Rock Hard Ride Free!

that's a pretty good poem

I thought this way when I was 14 years old. I'll trade you a collector's edition of God Hates Us All for Reign in Blood. You'll get over 50% more music!

I guess severzhavnost has never bought a grindcore album. Only 25 minutes, what a rip off!

I reckon that I fall into the camp that says that it depends on the context of the album as well as the genre. Generally speaking however, on average my preference seems to be heavily towards shorter run times. I've always been a quality before quantity individual and feel as if a lot of albums suffer from excess fat.

For this reason, there are seedy corners of Cyberspace where one can procure entire albums - without paying! But hey, you didn't learn that from me, you hear?

For overall album length, I'm like others in preferring the album about 40 minutes, and I can count on one hand how many albums over an hour that I enjoy well enough to listen in full. On the other side of the spectrum, I"m almost never bothered by brevity. On the length of songs inside, I do slightly prefer longer compositions so "ideal" would probably be 7 songs running at a 5-6 minute average.

40-45 minutes for regular studio albums. I'll suffer 50-55 minutes if it's a concept album.

Its just like movies for me. A good comedy is generally 90 minutes, whereas movies that really need to take time to develop can be 2 and a half hours and still hold my attention throughout. It really depends on what the band is doing with the record. I have never thought that a Symphony X album was too long, but I would probably tire very easily of an hour long thrash album.

Over time I've strongly come to prefer albums in the 30-40 minute or less range. Part of it is a judgment of quality: frankly, the longer an album is, the more room there is for long-winded filler and mediocrity to creep in. 'All killer no filler' is the order of the day and that is much likely to be met when the band keeps it short and sweet. And part of it is a mathematical calculation: when an album is short, I'm more likely to be able to listen to the entire thing in one go instead of being interrupted and losing the musical flow of things. I can't be the only one who gets super peeved about being unable to hear the last few songs in an album because you've arrived at your destination after a road trip/bike ride, etc.

That said, when it comes to my favorite bands, that 30-40 minute sweet spot loses importance to me and I'm a lot more open to longer records (shout out to the 'Road ). Even so, I only listen to 45+ minute albums on long drives or when I'm spending a lot of time working at the computer--i.e. times when I can actually listen to the whole thing in one go.

the ruins of beverast albums for me, i never think of the length (minus the newest which i don't listen to much).

ruins of beverast is a very good project, but imo the length of the albums is the one flaw. dude could really use some brevity sometimes, I mean he's never put out an album shorter than 70 minutes, it gets a bit much.

An album shouldn't be much longer than 40 minutes unless it has a damn good reason to be.

I join with those who say that an album short (max 40 min.) results more enjoyable. The latest so much long album I'm digging deep was Lie In Ruins "Towards divine death", about 70 min. of devastating, ponderous and destructive finnish death metal to the bone.

A lot of them do though. I can think of a bunch of my favorite albums that scrape the hour-long mark. Not every band can do it that way though, for sure.



Wow, what a witty response...

Depends on the band and how good the music is to my ears. But I'd say 40-45 minutes is a fairly good length since it's not too long or too short.

I agree with the general consensus, 40 minutes is pretty good. Again, like most everyone, I agree, some bands can pull off 60 or minutes with awesome songs. It's pretty rare though. In fact, I personally love when mature bands end up releasing something like Vader's This is the War. It's 15 minutes of excellent kickassery. The songs are tight, catchy and you can even sing along with them...as much as your throat will allow of course.

depends of the band actually if its good all food 60 plus is good, bad , shorter
I prefer 40min because bus at way to work, school what so ever, its perfect to listen it there and way home