Silence in Songs

Why do artists insist on putting silence in songs? I'm not talking about a few second here or there for dramatic effect, I'm talking about the endless voids some people add to their tunes, sometimes with some inane riff at the end to make it seemingly worthwhile (like those snippets at the end of the four miles of credits in a movie). Take 'All Good Things (Come To An End)' (sic) by Nelly Furtado, the album version has over a minute of silence tacked on the end. Which means I have to hit skip manually every time I listen to it or sit through endless silence.

I'm not sure why artists do it (I remember Oasis and Limo Bizkit albums with the same thing), maybe they think it's forcing you to contemplate what you've heard, or that it'll add to the feeling of the album, maybe give a restful pause, or allow time to nip away and do something in the mean time (like we don't have pause buttons or something). Lord only knows what the thinking behind it is, but it's totally useless, we buy albums to listen to the music, not silence, I can do that myself perfectly well thank you.

Bizarrely, this came to mind because Nelly is not ranking any plays on iTunes because it waits until you listen to the whole song before increasing the play count (which is stupid, if I listen to more than 10 seconds, say 30, it should be counted), so me skipping the silence meant it wasn't showing up in my most played list.

Incidentally, I fixed it by chopping off the excess using Audacity, so am now listening to a nice silence-free version, try doing that with DRM.