Roll Over Beethoven

How long has this been going on?

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony runs 74 minutes.

That is a long time.

But if y0u were a music fan in 1815 and wanted to catch a little of the Ninth, you couldn’t just crank up the iPod. You had to have your own in-house symphony orchestra and you had to crank up the band.

Not for everyone.

Playing music was expensive. And complicated.

So it was left to the very few and the very rich.

And if you were gonna go to all the trouble of cranking up the orchestra and getting everyone out in their best, then it sure as hell wasn’t gonna be over in 3 minutes.

So symphonies ran long. And so did operas. The general length of a piece in those days was, well, as long as it took.

Music, however, underwent a massive change with Edison’s invention of the phonograph.

Suddenly, anyone could listen to pretty much any piece of music any time they wanted. You didn’t have to have your own in-house orchestra and chappelmeister.  All you needed was a phonograph and a few records.

Records, in those days, were made from pressed shellac with grooves physically cut into the records.  The width of the groove and the speed at which the record was spun determined how much recording time there was on any given disc. At 10 inches, the industry standard for a long time, and later at 45 RPM, each record could hold about 3 minutes of recording.

Hence, the optimum length for a recorded song was 3 minutes, give or take a bit.

(Hey Jude runs 4:00)

And so it came to pass that the great democratization of music – that is, that anyone could now listen to any piece of music whenever they wanted (so long as they bought the records and owned a record-player) – also led to a kind of standardization of the product.

Songs were targeted at 3 minutes because that was how long the record lasted on a side.

And as the recordings went, so too went our attention span.

Ironically, when CDs were first designed, the process was reversed.  CDs were built to have record times of 74 minutes, because that was the length of Beethoven’s Ninth, (when performed by Herbert Von Karajien).

Now we come to television.

It goes without saying that until very very recently (like yesterday), making television (like owning your own orchestra) was strictly a rich man’s game.  Bill Paley might had the CBS Studios at his disposal, but very few others did. What the Elector of Hanover was to Music; what the Medici was to Art, Paley was to TV.

Television programs run to half hours and hours because that works best in a linear tune-in world. (Actually 22 minutes and 44 minutes, taking out the commercial time).  But as we move into a non-linear, online video world, the question becomes, ‘what is the optimum length of a TV show?”

Do the half-hour formats go away?

Maybe TV shows are better seen in 3-minute segments, like songs?

Maybe documentaries should run 3 minutes?

Maybe the news should be 3 minutes…with a soundtrack?

Well, why not?

As Neil Postman wrote in “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, when talking about how the printed page had molded our very way of thinking: “its emphasis on logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment and discipline”.  Those are all the products of a piece of technology as well – the printed page.  As the 45 drove music, so the printed page drove linear thought so the screen + video will drive another way of thinking and seeing the world and representation as well.

In the world of music, there is no longer any reason to cling to the 3 minute song.  We can store and download just about anything, of any length.

So too in the nonlinear, video driven screenworld, can we begin now to play with the lengths and formats of how we deliver news, information and entertainment.

All bets are off – if only we have the courage to disengage ourselves from the past.

Roll over…