File this under "things I assumed everyone knew but of course they don't," which becomes more of a thing the older you get. Some songs don't really have an ending, they just fade out while the artist repeats the chorus. I did not know that the fade out ending is rarely used these days. Taylor Swift's new album The Tortured Poets Department uses this technique, and some Swifties think it's a new thing. It used to be very common.
The fade out was not because the musicians didn't know how to end a song. They certainly do, as they make most of their money from live performances. In its heyday, the fade out was used for singles only; songs on an album rarely faded out before The Tortured Poets Department. However, the fade out has been performed live, in several instances before the advent of recorded music. Read about these historic performances and the modern use of the fade out at Mental Floss.
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It wasn't so much the programmers, but the higher-ups who insisted on DJs never playing a song longer than three minutes so they could sell X units of ads. That's the reason record companies made a shorter single that faded out, because otherwise they wouldn't get radio play for the full version.
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I always get a kick when something that's been around forever is all of sudden 'discovered' due to lack of historical knowledge. Not surprising in this case if your only music input is from some blonde woman. Anyway, if the fade out has been around forever, how can Mental Floss make the claim it was invented to appease programmers? That's pretty weak. Can't argue that D.J.s needed time to yak, but to give them that there were often two versions of a song - the album version and the one released for radio. And I distinctly remember a time back in the day when some radio stations were proclaiming "Have you noticed we're not talking over the songs?" Anyway, here's a couple articles that also explain the fade out: https://globalnews.ca/news/4615641/why-some-songs-fade-out-alan-cross/ and https://slate.com/culture/2014/09/the-fade-out-in-pop-music-why-dont-modern-pop-songs-end-by-slowly-reducing-in-volume.html
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