Edits of short songs

I was going over some old messages and ran into a thread about Joan Jett's "I Love Rock N Roll" from several months ago. In that thread it mentioned the 45 version ran 2:45 while the LP version ran 2:55, with one of the choruses edited out on the 45.

I can certainly understand edits of longer songs appearing on 45s so they'd be more "radio friendly", but I've always wondered why they sometimes edited shorter songs as well. Using the Joan Jett single as an example, there's just one edit in that otherwise it's the exact same as the LP. Why would they go to the trouble of doing an edit of just a few seconds when the song is already fairly short?

For that matter, I'm surprised that so many 45s were just a few seconds shorter than their LP versions, either with an early fade or an edit. (I guess in radio a few seconds matter, right?)

Sometimes labels did it to make people buy the longer version on the LP.

That argument has merit, but wouldn't apply in the case of "I Love Rock & Roll," in which the edit appears toward the end.

Oh, I agree with that--my point was the actual edit of "ILR&R" was toward the end, so the argument about why shave 10 seconds off that song in relation to Gordon's point about cutting the intro in half doesn't apply (since that's not what they edited).

A better song that illustrates the point is Dr. Hook's "Sylvia's Mother"--there the intro is shaved in half (but it's still a really small edit). Still another example would be Air Supply's "All Out Of Love."

Of course, as far as I know the all time champ would be "Marrakesh Express" (the two second spoken intro is on the LP but not the 45). :)