ALBUMS NOW SHORTER DOWN UNDER

Good news for Australian artists: in future, they won't have to work as hard to qualify for entry into the Australian Music Prize. Hitherto, albums have been considered as a body of musical work forty minutes or longer. But, after a slew of protests from musicians who simply don't have the stamina for that sort of work, the organisers have announced analbum is now only 33 and a third minutes long:

Prize director Scott Murphy said in a press release “We’ve made a pretty obvious mistake which we all, particularly me, simply didn’t notice – until I started to receive queries from musicians stating that their ‘albums’ were under 40 minutes…. yet by all other criteria, still albums. After quick email and phone communications over the past week we’ve made the unanimous decision to lower the minimum required minutes of music. We’ll make every effort possible to ensure all musicians know of this change.”

Oddly, there doesn't seem to be any willingness to reduce the retail prices of albums by eight per cent to reflect this new criteria.

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