Always fade out at the end of a montage.....when you fade out it feels like more time has passed in a montage.

So basically, the examples at the end reinforce her point at the beginning: fade-outs are a cop-out, an anti-ending. They function reasonably well in cases where the artist has no idea how to actually end the song. That seems particularly true with pop songs, where there really isn't a particular message or story in place, it's just some danceable nonsense - what's the logical conclusion to that?

I've become increasingly aware of fade-outs over the years when listening to older songs, and I suspect it's due to their relative rarity today. In the past they were so standard as to be the expected default, so I never noticed them. They irritate me now: "I don't know what to do with the ending, guess I'll just repeat this last bit an arbitrary number of times while slowly making it quieter." The example she gives of Holst's "Neptune" is in my view the somewhat rare case of a fade-out being used for the right reason, to convey a particular idea, or meaning, or feeling.

When used as the default in lieu of coming up with a real ending to the song, I hate the fade-out. When it makes sense in context, they're fine. I don't often run into the latter.

Moving this video to oritteropo's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

Fade-outs are (were) done for radio play (when not for artistic reasons), so that songs can overlap or someone can start speaking over the end. Youtube videos have a defined beginning and an end so it makes sense the music should go that way too.

The nice thing about fade-outs is they sometimes hold easter eggs, but mostly I find them annoying. For in-car listening I either make them louder or cut them short or both.

What I took away from all this is that a long version of "Life during wartime" is available sans fade-out, scratching a 30 year itch.

Also made me remember 70s singles which skipped on the last groove of the record - except I dont remember which ones those were...

That is what I thought the fade out was for, it allowed better overlap of going from song A to song B on the radio. I also figured it might have to do with physical records, making it easier to go from song A to song B, but couldn't figure out a really reasonable reason on why they'd have to do that, so figured most of it was for radio reasons.

It does sound very odd to have a hard stop and start to a song, and without the fade out, you manually have to move the volume of the songs on the mixer... of course most sons on the radio are done via digital methods, so they can setup an automatic fade, and automatic gain if needed. That or you add a second of silence between tracks.