Stop Being Broken tips for living in the near future — more…

Radio Edits

Listening to an abridged version of a song is worse than not listening to it at all.

 Loading …

My thanks and apologies to Mario Ajero for mangling his podsafe version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Op. 27, No. 2, mvt. 1.

I agree with your premise here, I really do. But after listening to your classical music example, I can’t help but conclude that the edit was *good*.

Hear me out here…

The original first movement is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And, depending on how fast you play it, it’s somewhere in the realm of 6 to 7 minutes long.

But you can listen to a few minutes of it, and still appreciate its beauty. Now I admit that it’s not as good as hearing the entire thing. That doesn’t make it necessarily bad.

However, this is because I’ve heard the whole thing. And I enjoy it. Maybe the problem is, if that’s the first time somebody was exposed to this music, they might not like it as much as they otherwise would. And so they’ll never bother to seek out the whole thing - or indeed realize that there is more to it that they have heard.

So this is where I come back to completely agreeing with you. I’ll admit that I listen to commercial radio. Pop stations, even. And I’ve heard a lot of songs only in that format. I learned recently that one song that I quite enjoyed because of its energy and tempo was actually being played *sped up*. About 10bpm. When I heard the original, I didn’t like it as much.

But that’s the point - my opinion wasn’t formed against the original work. I formed an opinion around a derivative work which was being passed off as the original.

And that stinks.

It’s like Billy Joel said… “It was a beautiful song but it ran too long / if you’re gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit / so they cut it down to three-oh-five”.

I think you may have overestimated the general public’s knowledge of Beethoven. Now, had it been a PDQ Bach piece… Also, as radio edits go, I don’t think the Beethoven was sped up enough, nor did it have an unnecessary drum machine running in the background.

I agree that radio edits are a disservice to the music but I’d still rather hear an edited version then no version at all.

With that said, the Beethoven edit was quite well done. Not being the classical buff, I had to go back and listen to the original to remember what I was missing.

I totally agree Bryan. But…

I bite of a sandwich is better than no sandwich at all.

i prefer short songs. i like it when bands write short songs to begin with, but i have no problem with someone making a song shorter if it maintains the integrity of the original.