Average length of albums over the years.

Recently some folks have been discussing how much space to allocate for FLAC compressed music, if you wanted to re-rip your music in it. Tkil had asked me a while ago and I divided my actual space used by a rough count of albums, and came up with the number 300MB per CD. I also said that FLACs run around 1mbps bit-rate (a 33% savings over uncompressed 1.5mbps CDs). FLACs are lossless, so comparing them to the size of MP3s or Oggs is not really useful.

So, spamgod was doing the math on 1mbps and a 50 minute per disc average obtained from some music site, and said the numbers didn't match up. I pointed out that I suspected that average album length has probably been going up over the last 15 years, and that probably 70% of my CDs were purchased before 1990. In 1990 I decided to boycott the RIAA because of their bullshit, and since then I've purchased only a handful of CDs (compared to the 400 I bought between 1985 and 1990).

Tkil, being anal retentive (or is that "anal-retentive", I can never remember), went through his collection of several thousand CDs and collected data about the average length per year. From his text data, I created this graph:

On average, albums have increased by about 5 minutes per year decade since 1980. Or, as Tkil says in stats-geek mode: "avg=0.4904x - 926.25 R^2=0.7919".