What is the longest song to ever reach number one?
Attention spans are at a record low in the modern age, as our collective dependency on instant gratification predictability comes back to bite us. The pop music industry, on the other hand, has always been built upon principles of short attention spans.
Since the dawn of the music industry, the typical accepted length of a song has always been within the two to five-minute window, and if you look at the pop charts of today, you will probably find that the same rule still applies. The relatively short length of songs goes back to the good old days when pop’s prevailing format was on seven-inch vinyl records, played at 45 rpm as how they are made ruled the duration of the single.
If you had a song longer than four or five minutes, it would either have to be split over two sides of a record, forcing the listener to flip the disc halfway through, or, alternatively, squeezed onto one side at the expense of audio quality. Neither option was particularly appealing to record labels after the 45 rpm single entered the scene in the early 1950s, so it was decreed they should be relatively short in content.
For years, that tactic was going swimmingly, and the pop landscape was perpetuated by short, sharp, anthems. However, the free-spirited hippie age of the 1960s threw something of a spanner in the works. Artists began to pursue expansive, experimental new sounds, runtimes started to grow, and that practice only increased with the advent of album-focused compositions moving away from the single format entirely.
Today, when anybody with primary school knowledge of the internet can make and distribute their own musical material, with tracks as long or as short as their heart and skills desire. Nevertheless, the two-to-five-minute format persists owing both to tradition and the ever-diminishing listening spans of audiences. Still, there have been a few instances of much longer songs entering into the pop charts over the decades.
The longest-ever single to reach the US number one spot should come as no surprise to anybody paying attention to the pop landscape, with Taylor Swift’s ten-minute-13-second recording of ‘All Too Well (Taylor’s Version)’ making history at the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 2021.
Although impressive as a single, ‘All Too Well’ is not the longest song to ever enter the US charts. That particular accolade goes to the succinctly-named 2023 track, ‘I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a “Rap” Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time’ by André 3000.
But what is the longest number one in the UK?
The Swifties among you might already have realised that ‘All Too Well (Taylor’s Version)’ peaked at number three in the UK singles chart upon its release, hence out of the running this side of the Atlantic.
For Britain’s longest number one single, then, we have to travel back all the way to 1998 for Oasis’ ‘All Around The World’. Clocking in at nine minutes and 38 seconds, the single version of the song was, bizarrely, longer than the version included on Be Here Now.
That entire album was full of tracks that were, if we’re being honest with each other, could quite easily have been trimmed down. ‘D’You Know What I Mean’, for example, borders on the eight-minute mark, and that was the record’s opening track, culminating in a widespread feeling that Be Here Now was wildly overblown, especially when comparing it to the Britpop heroes’ previous records.
Still, it did at least land them with the accolade of the longest number one single in UK chart history thus far, if that even mattered to them.
