Originally Posted by
WaitingWatchingLookingForAChance
Hopefully someone else can confirm this, but the reason why most of the Supremes' hits [[and Motown's as well as the rest of the industry's records) were under 3 minutes is a fairly practical one. I'm fairly sure Ralph or someone else here has stated that you HAD to fade a record before the 3-minute mark because the volume would immediately drop during the mastering process. So how did Phil Spector manage a record over 3 minutes? Good question...
So even if you could get a record to be longer than 3 minutes, it might not get onto radio station playlists. I don't know how it was in other countries/continents, but I've been learning from more than a few books on the history of Top 40 Radio, that stations didn't favor long records. I think it had to do with the format being geared towards playing so many records in a frame of time, keep the go-go pace going; a long record would throw off the increasingly tighter and tighter schedules radio stations were favoring. That's why Phil had to lie about the timing of "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" and even after the truth was discovered, radio stations I think were still ticked off about it.
It wasn't until maybe '67 with the newer, hipper bands coming on the scene that things started to change -but not much. On the whole, AM radio doggedly stuck to 3-minutes and under as the rule. FM radio was still new and uncharted territory and often used as an outlet for soundtracks and show tunes. Only until the college kids started using FM to play an underground format of Rock and entire albums did radio start playing longer cuts. But until AM completely died out as far as playing music, it was still all about keeping 'em short and sweet.
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