Listening to a record is ritual. You gently remove the vinyl from the sleeve, place it on the turntable and lower the tone arm. Twenty minutes later you lift it, flip the record and play side two.

Side one had the big opener, the one with the hook, and the radio single. Side two you’d get a little deeper, vulnerable or weird, and often find magic. It was a formula, one created by the constraints of the medium of the music’s reproduction, the LP, as much as the song length. The format directed decisions made by the musicians when deciding what would make the final cut.

There is beauty in this discipline. Twenty-three minutes maximum per side. You had a physical boundary, a hard stop. You had to earn each side. There were ruthless choices to be made. “Does this song deserve a larger audience?” “Does it belong on side one or is it a B-side for a single?” “Does it earn its spot or is this other one better?”

The ultimate editor was time, pitting songs against each other.

This dynamic made the greatest albums. They wouldn’t exist without it. It was a death match in the studio, every song fighting for a spot. Then came the sequencing and another fight. Track one, side one had to kick in your teeth while the side one closer had to make you want to flip the record and once you did you needed to find a warm welcome back.

Things were good, then there was something new, the compact disc, and the Pandora’s box it opened.

74 minute, pushing double LP space. All of a sudden artists had an extra 29 minutes or so. It was heralded as freedom. It was also marketed like freedom: musicians could give the fans everything.

Sadly, they did.

Editing? Optional. That tight ten song LP? Sixteen tracks of sprawl. Songs that would have been on the cutting room floor in 1979 were now Track 14, neatly sandwiched between a remix and a moody acoustic demo no one quite believed in. There was a bad case of bloat. Continuity disappeared with the death of Side One and Side Two. It was no longer a journey, it became a fall down a rabbit hole.

Then just as quickly things shifted again. Enter the internet and the emptying of Pandora’s box.

Time limits? That’s funny. No sides. No runtime. No physical format to provide some guardrail, some limit, some voice to say “Maybe cut this one.” You can upload everything now: half-baked demos, that jam that sounded good in the moment, the song you wrote taking a dump in under twelve minutes because you got to feed the algorithm. It was no longer about making an album, but producing output.

The art of keeping things locked in the vault had become extinct.

That is the problem, constraints make mediocre art great. Twenty minutes or so per side, you think like a storyteller. Every note must contribute something to the albums flow; you cut a decent song in favor of a great one. The fate of a song becomes argued like it is a life or death decision.

And it was.

There is a difference between a good album and the ones we call masterpieces and that is determined, often, by what we never heard. There are miles of tape in dusty studio storerooms holding thousands of hours of okay tracks that lost the argument. Thank God it happened and they died so the album could live.

That is the crux of the matter, there isn’t necessarily too much music, it is there is too little editing. We don’t need to hear every idea a band has, we need the ones that they fought to keep.

This is something vinyl knows.

That’s why we’re still flipping the record.