Do radio edits make sense?

Well, I think that I've already mentioned that music is my favourite expression of art and recently, David Gilmour released a new song “Between Two Points”, on his latest album Luck and Stranged. Along with the almost 6-minute song, he released a radio edit, with relatively half of its duration. But why?

When listening to radio, people want to get entertained without spending lots of time on a song — or a podcast or an interview —, specially if it's one that they don't enjoy. And, well, contrary to online music broadcasting platforms, you can't skip it. I get that. But do radio edits make sense, i.e., to produce a short version of it? Let's get down into the rabbit hole.

Let's think of when you're visiting a museum and looking at famous paintings like La Guernica, from Pablo Picasso, but it’s cropped and divided into several rooms because there's no wall there big enough to display that painting entirely. Fracturing paintings intentionally apparently doesn’t seem to make sense, does it? Artists have total freedom to choose to paint a big or a small one, regardless of their reason. Museums should have methods/infrastructures to display them as they are.

What about a movie? Or a TV series? I’ve never seen a cropped movie broadcasted on a channel, neither a series episode (well... maybe some few exceptions like The Lord of the Rings). Movies are getting longer and longer ^1, and that's not a reason to start watching them in two or more parts on a TV channel...

Another examples could be shared to illustrate my idea, however, I feel that radio edits are like passing demos of a song, i.e., sharing part of a masterpiece, when no other forms of art have such thing. It's a decriminalisation of the song and artists are kind of obligated to make short versions of it to get their songs on the radio. Isn't this encouraging artists to make shorter songs, limitating their time to share their expressions or ideas?

Very few of my favourite songs (check this previous article here) have less than 5 minutes, which makes them very unlikely to be heard on the radio. Not because they're unappropriated, not because they're out of beat, not because they're not their radio station style... but because they're too long. Radios are very unlikely to broadcast songs which duration are longer than 5 minutes ^2. And, to the best of my knowledge, there is no station nowadays which would like to bet on this. But, on the other side, radios sometimes broadcast long interviews, or podcasts which can't be of the public's interest...

Long music masterpieces, with more than 5 or 10 minutes shouldn't be cropped or edited so that it can be broadcasted on radio. Hearing the original version of it should be the normal paradigm. Don't you think?

P.S.: We know that we have control of what we listen when using online music streaming platforms. The same applies to movies and series platforms. And radio is not popular nowadays as it was before. But we're focusing here on the "traditional" broadcasting services. The "migration" and comparison between them can be discussed on other blog post 🙂