You really shouldn't close a rant tag unless you open one first. And here I was, thinking you were a professional web designer...

Vince

Hmm, I find it is the other way around: I get annoyed at the radio edit for being a disjointed version of the album track. What, can't people sit and listen to a seven minute song? I want a song to build and grow naturally and take as much time as it needs; I don't want to hear a song with clumsy jump cuts so that it can be conveniently shoehorned into some broadcasting exec's arbitrary opinion of how long he thinks listeners want songs to be.

Different sides of the same coin, I think. :D

But it is worth bearing in mind that the stuff I listen to is hardly chart friendly to start with, songs that routinely push the ten minute barrier, so I feel the irritation more keenly when a lengthy album track is awkwardly truncated down to three radio-friendly minutes. This is a futile effort anyway because, A) they are the kinds of bands who don't appeal to the singles buying demographic and, B) the CD singles chart is next to dead anyway and means nothing. With downloading of single tracks become more commonplace, the concept of the album may soon die out and be replaced with the white label culture of the early dance scene where artists released but a few tracks at a time on 12" vinyls rather than album length collections.

Part of the reason why there is a radio version of any given song is to allow for a different mix (one more optimized for FM technology) to be used (to try and get more airtime). Another reason to allow the song to be played and still get around the FCC.

Yeah, true. There are many reasons, some of them even valid reasons if you buy into it, but still... I do find it frustrating sometimes.