It depends on who sings the song, you see. We have a guy at our local song circle who cycles through most songs in half the time it took the original artist to do them. ;-) Then you have the opposite extreme, the very slow rendition, but that's not so common.

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"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, in my opinion, lasts just about exactly the right amount of time. It's an epic song of an epic story, and it tells the whole story. Very cool. I've noticed that people either love it or hate it, and this could have to do partly with whether the story itself really interests them or not, I think. If you're deeply interested in and caught up in the details of a story, you don't mind it taking a long time, because you want to savour every moment and image. If, on the other hand, it basically just doesn't grab you, then you can't be bothered sustaining the attention for very long (if at all).

Some other long songs of that type (they either grab you...or they don't) are Buffy Sainte-Marie's epic "My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying" and Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy".

People who don't like those songs are not criticizing the song on its intrinsic merits, in my opinion...they are simply making it quite clear that the subject matter doesn't interest them very much for whatever reason...or perhaps the singer's style doesn't interest them.

If the subject matter fascinated them and if they loved the performer too, they'd love the song.

When you love someone or love what they do, you just can't get enough of it. When you don't care, well, your attention span will be quite short.