Derik in Minnesota

12:44 pm - On the structure of Record Albums

My “why” phase was legendary. When I was in second grade, I synthesized Zeno’s Paradox and spent a very frustrating car ride trying to explain it to my mother. It was around the same time that I first noticed a nagging pattern in my parent’s old record albums; the “good” songs (an entirely subjective judgment) tended to be bunched together towards the beginning of the album, with maybe one decent song on the b-side. Graphed over time, the relationship would look like this:

I’m not a major audiophile, but this has always bugged me, because I could never figure out why the albums were patterned this way. …until last night.
The following is a transcript of a discussion between myself and Joe Rovang:
( My Moment of Revelation is below the cut )