Over at Marginal Revolution, a reader (who identifies himself as Adam Smith, no less) poses an interesting music question:

Why are the typical lengths of albums across different music genres so different? In particular, I was thinking most of my rap albums are at least over the hour mark and many run all the way up to the 80-minute maximum. They’re usually packed with intros, skits, and lots of 5 minute tracks that have extended intro and outro instrumental beat only sequences. My metal albums, on the other hand, have an average run length of no more than 40 mins. Most albums are between 8 and 10 tracks with little in the way of tangential material. These different run-times show up in other places too. For example, my older jazz albums (i.e. Kind of Blue, Time Out, Blue Train) typically run around 45 mins with a half dozen or so tracks yet my newer jazz albums like MMW’s The Dropper run almost the whole 80 mins. Also, prog. rock bands tend to produce much longer albums than garage rock bands. Even adjusting for the fact that prog bands emphasize longer musical passages, they could compensate by just having fewer songs or garage rock bands could just have twice as many (like the White Stripes did on their first album).

Is there a relative price argument for these differences? Or even signaling? Perhaps there is a rat race among rappers to signal they’re capable of coming up with enough material to fill out the maximum length, even if it includes lots of filler. Perhaps the recording costs are lower as instrumentation relies so heavily on sampling. Maybe metal runs into diminishing returns after 30 mins or so where the listener becomes numb to the intensity.

Professor Cowen’s answers will surely run hotter than mine, so let’s review mine first. (And before I start, it bears mention that the reader’s closing sentence — set off in bold font above — is almost certainly true.)

1. First, ceteris paribus (ed. note: when conversing with libertarians it is key to throw out a Latin phrase or two, to establish rapport) a shorter record seems more indicative of record label influence. A longer record seems more indicative of artist influence. Maybe this is the misperception of an outsider, but it seems that a producer will be more inclined to toss even more songs out. The songwriter, by the word’s very definition, will be more inclined to throw even more songs in. Hip hop albums are notorious for their truckloads of filler. Even my favorite releases in that genre (The Score by Fugees, 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days In The Life Of… by Arrested Development, and Speakerboxxx/The Love Below by Outkast) are soaked heavy with throwaway tracks, unfunny spoken word exchanges, and overcooked song elements.

If I’m right — that is to say, if rappers wield disproportionate influence over their record labels — that raises a cottage industry of follow-up questions, not the least of which is, Why? Does the short answer amount to good old-fashioned supply and demand? Does a relatively new art form imply a new industry, and a new industry imply new rules? Are rappers more sophisticated parties to contract? Better negotiators? Some combination thereof? Or are there other dynamics at play that are invisible to the music consumer?

2. Next, and I made a similar point in another response to a Marginal Revolution post: culture creates culture. Meaning sub-sets of culture build up around jazz records, heavy metal records, audience behavior at the opera, Tool concerts. If your last ten jazz record purchases were 45 minutes long, it’s a safe bet that your next ten will be as well. Because that’s what jazz artists do, apparently. They release 45-minute-long records. I called it “cultural momentum” at the time although I didn’t like the term then and still don’t.

3. As a corollary to # 2 above — and maybe this constitutes picking the low fruit — but never underestimate the power of the staff meeting. I was horrified to read that a well-paced Hollywood blockbuster is considered by executive producers to fall somewhere between 26 and 28 scenes long. Meaning the suits will send your film back to the editing room if it weighs in at 29 scenes, and will call the actors back in for a reshoot if you’ve only managed 25. Even if the variance of 16% seems trivial to us common folk. So maybe record labels really are as bad as you’ve all been telling me they are, and contemporary jazz LPs run 80 minutes because, dammit, that’s what our shareholders demand.

Let’s see what Tyler Cowen had to say:

1. The average career of a rapper is short. A long CD increases the chance that something will “stick” and the rapper won’t get too many other chances to try.

2. Some metal bands develop great loyalty among their followers and achieve durable franchises. That gives them a lower discount rate and they are more inclined to save up material for the future. Plus they are marketing an overall sound — rather than clever particular innovations — and if the first forty (five?) minutes don’t convince you nothing will. Rap songs probably have a higher individual variance.

3. Many older albums are short for technological reasons, plus the albums were due in relatively rapid succession for contractual reasons. In the 1960s there was lots of technological advance in music, so if you sat on the sidelines for a few years you could become obsolete.

4. It is relatively easy for a contemporary jazz artist to tack on additional improvisations and he can choose standard compositions if necessary. Other forms of popular music cannot expand quantity so easily without hitting a wall in terms of quality. One prediction here is that “compositional jazz” albums should be shorter in average length than albums of jazz improvisation, contemporary that is.

5. If you wanted a somewhat strained explanation, you could argue that the longer CD is a more bundled product and it will make economic sense as a form of price discrimination, the more varied the valuations of the audience. This would require that rap CD buyers have a higher variance of marginal valuation.

Yeah, I noticed that, too. His explanations ran way hotter than mine did. Ouch!