Since I like Tamil songs and statistics so much, I did some analysis on the ~1,400 Tamil songs I'd listened to in 2006.
The trends are around the length of a typical film song are interesting. For example:
Songs have gotten longer over time. On average, a song in the 60s was 4 minutes. A song in the 2000s is 5 minutes. Each decade adds about 14 seconds to the length of a song.
But some of the old movies have pretty long songs. Thiruvilaiyadal and Vanjikkottai Vaaliban have among the longest songs on average, for example.
As a corollary, newer music directors make longer songs. While KV Mahadevan's songs lasted 4 minutes, Ilayaraja's songs lasted 4.5 minutes, and AR Rahman's songs last 5 minutes. Today, Ramesh Vinayagam's compositions are 5.5 minutes.
However, Deva seems to make longer songs than usual for a 1990s director (5.5 minutes), while Devi Sri Prasad makes shorter songs for a 200os director (4.3 minutes).
Since I rated the songs, I could also analyse my preferences. I like older songs a bit more.
My top movies list for instance, has only one movie from the 2000s, 2 from the 90s, 5 from the 80s, 1 from the 60s and 1 from the 50s.
My all-time favourite movie (for songs) is Vaidhegi Kaathirundhaal. I didn't need the analysis to tell me that, though.
My all-time favourite music director is G Ramanathan, thanks to Uthama Puthiran, Ambikapathy, Madurai Veeran, etc. AM Raja follows, and then the great Ilayaraja. It's interesting that AR Rahman falls below Harris Jayaraj and Deva. He also falls below MS Viswanathan, but that's not surprising.
For quite a while, I was convinced I liked shorter songs. But surprisingly, it turns out that my preference is quite independent of the length of the song! Anyway, all time favourites short songs include:
P.S.: It's interesting that three of them have Bharathiyar songs in them.
All of this analysis was possible because I recently dumped WinAmp and moved to MediaMonkey, which lets you write your own scripts.
Try this: search for a song and listen online.
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