The 582-Hour Song

The median recording is about three and a half minutes. This page is about the other end — the 210 recordings longer than a day, and the one that is longer than three weeks.

The far end has a sociology. 49,228 recordings run over an hour — DJ sets, ambient works, audiobooks, the odd raga. Past a day, the crowd thins to drone and conceptual art, and past a hundred hours it belongs to one tradition. Its founder is [Bull of Heaven](/artist/2477543), the late-2000s experimental project that treated duration itself as the composition; their titles read like the marginalia of a mad monastery (Pleasure Alone Lends Value to Existence, 141 hours; Change Not as Much as the Style of a Letter, 386).

Their best piece is pure mathematics: [lcm(2,3,5,7,11,13,17)](/recording/29851580) — the least common multiple of the first seven primes is 510,510, the piece is 510,510 seconds long, and that is 141.8 hours, which is exactly what the length field says. The title is the length; the length is the title. Seven prime-period loops phase against each other and come back into alignment precisely once — at the end, 5.9 days later, assuming you were still there.

But the throne has been usurped by a disciple. [LADY LAKE II](/recording/35917809), by the drone project OS2 // WARP, runs 582 hours — twenty-four and a quarter days — long enough to play the median pop song ten thousand times. OS2 // WARP holds four of the top eight, out-monking the monastery with titles like To Fill Every Lotus of the Universe With Their Buddhas. Bull of Heaven's real legacy shows up elsewhere in the graph anyway: they are one of the most namesaked artists in music, honored by six tribute acts whose names — Ass of Heaven, Bowl of Heaven, Shitpost of Heaven, Bull of heaven of heaven — prove that even a 386-hour drone can't escape the internet.

(At the other other end: the shortest entries in the length column read 0.001 seconds and are, to be honest, mostly catalog vandalism — though metal fans know the true shortest song runs 1.316 seconds and won a Guinness citation for it. You suffer, but why?)

Method: recording length fields, top of the distribution; sub-five-second entries are dominated by data noise and judged by hand. 49,228 recordings exceed one hour; 210 exceed 24 hours. Computed August 2026 against the 2026-07-25 build.