Although, as Pitchfork points out, there were times in the late ‘‘90s and early 2000s when the average rap album was even longer than it is now. The LP was intended to be a double disc, and the project ran for one hour and 30 minutes.Īccording to Rolling Stone, the duration of the top five streamed albums on Spotify rose almost 10 minutes between 20, to an average of 60 minutes. Then, six months later, Drake dropped his 25-track project Scorpion. In January 2018, the Migos followed with Culture II, a 24-track album that ran for an hour and 45 minutes. In 2017, Chris Brown dropped his 45-track album Heartbreak on a Full Moon, which clocked in at two hours and 38 minutes. In 2016, Drake released Views, a 20-song album with a runtime of one hour and 21 minutes (naturally, it broke streaming records at the time). If you ask any rap fan about long albums over the past five years, there are a few examples that will be mentioned more than others. The longer a tracklist gets, the more likely there will be redundancies and songs that should have been left on the cutting room floor. For fans, though, consuming an excessive amount of music from the same artist in one sitting is often tedious and doesn’t make for a great listening experience.

So, if less is more everywhere else, why are albums getting longer?įor artists, there are obvious benefits in putting out an extended body of work-more songs usually means more streams. Minimalism is taking over the fashion and architecture industries, but it seems to have skipped the music industry. In the streaming era, there are no physical limitations on the length of an album, and it’s become common for tracklists to reach or exceed 20 songs.įor years, fans have complained about long albums, and yet artists keep releasing 20-plus-track projects. Polo G’s Hall of Fame has a total of 20 songs, clocking in at 54 minutes Migos’ Culture III has 19 tracks and runs for one hour and 15 minutes and Lil Baby and Lil Durk’s joint project The Voice of the Heroes runs for one hour with 18 tracks. On the week of June 28, three out of the top five albums on the Billboard 200 had a duration of 50 minutes or more.

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