As the visualization says, I averaged the lengths of the 50 most popular (i.e. most frequently logged, not most highly rated) albums for each year on RateYourMusic. I removed two extreme outliers (Natural Snow Buildings by Daughter of Darkness [7:20:00] and Glitch Princess by yeule [5:27:18]) but otherwise let the data speak for itself.
I added labels for key milestones in the develop of recorded music to help contextualize the data, but I leave it to the viewer to decide the extent to which these indicate a causal relationship.
Posted by airynothing1
7 comments
Imagine time traveling back to the 80s and showing people this chart. Obviously they wouldn’t know anything about streaming, but “LPs take over CDs” would be almost as implausible as “Donald Trump is serving his SECOND term as POTUS.”
2037: Cassettes overtake digital downloads, somehow.
50 albums is not a good sample
i woulda done the 50 best selling albums compared to the top 50 most popular on rym. they have a much more niche music taste and i bet that swans and gy!be are weighing the averages down
My caption should say “*Daughters of Darkness* by Natural Snow Buildings,” not the other way around.
Would be interesting to normalize by genre, given the likely correlation with genre and album length.
It would be interesting to have a legend about capacity per medium.
How many minutes does a side of a vinyl record max out at? A cassette? A CD?
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