Songs are getting shorter. From 2013 to 2018, the average song on the Billboard Hot 100 fell from 3 minutes and 50 seconds to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Six percent of hit songs were 2:30 or shorter in 2018, up from just 1% five years before.
What's going on? Partially, it's the economics of streaming. More streams means more money, and even then it's not a lot, which is why an artist's overall volume is so crucial. But that's not all there is to the story—the trend started long before Spotify took off.
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 Shrinking pop songsFebruary 13, 2019 |
The downward spiral
Songs are getting shorter. From 2013 to 2018, the average song on the Billboard Hot 100 fell from 3 minutes and 50 seconds to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Six percent of hit songs were 2:30 or shorter in 2018, up from just 1% five years before.
What's going on? Partially, it's the economics of streaming. More streams means more money, and even then it's not a lot, which is why an artist's overall volume is so crucial. But that's not all there is to the story—the trend started long before Spotify took off.
Can we request your attention for just a minute?
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4 minutes+: Median length of a Billboard Hot 100 song in 2000
~3.5 minutes: Median length of a Billboard Hot 100 song in 2018
34.3%: Streaming's share of revenue in 2015
75%: Streaming's share of revenue in 2018
2015: Year streaming overtook digital downloads as the music industry's biggest source of revenue in the US
Show me some examples
Let's look at Kendrick Lamar, one of the world's most popular musicians right now. The average track length on Lamar's breakout 2013 album good kid, m.A.A.d city is 5 minutes 37 seconds. All are 3 minutes 30 seconds or longer. On Lamar's most recent album DAMN., the average song is 3 minutes and 57 seconds. DAMN. won the Pulitzer Prize for music, going to show that this trend isn't necessarily lowering the quality of music.
It's not just Lamar. The trend can be seen many of music's biggest stars, like the rapper and singer Drake, perhaps pop music's most dominant force.
Unlike Lamar, Drake's albums are getting longer as his songs get shorter.
Kanye West's tracks are also getting dramatically shorter. His 2016 album The Life of Pablo had eight tracks that were less than three minutes long, while on 2010's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy there were only two.
Country songs are shrinking too. Eric Church and Jason Aldean have been nearly constant with the number of song on each of their albums, but their songs keep getting shorter and shorter.
A short story about long songs
The Beatles were one of the bands most responsible for pushing the length of individual songs. The 7-minute, 11-second "Hey Jude"—more than two and a half minutes longer than 45-rpm singles were designed to accommodate—reshaped the technology and economics of the era. The group had to overrule their producer, the great George Martin, who objected to its length; when he said that DJs wouldn't play it, John Lennon responded "they will if it's us." And they had to fit it on a single, somehow. The longer songs get, the grooves have to get thinner, so the music gets quieter. Their label's engineers had to vary the size of the grooves where the song could handle it to squeeze the masterpiece in.
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Pop quiz What's the shortest Billboard #1 song? |
Do the economics of streaming make songs shrink?
Payments from music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music made up 75% all US music revenues in 2018 (pdf), compared to just 21% in 2013. Streaming services pay music rights holders per play. Spotify doesn't say the exact amount it pays artists for each stream, but reports suggest it is somewhere between $0.004 and $0.008. Every song gets paid the same. Kanye West's 2010 five-minute opus "All Of the Lights" gets the same payment as West's two-minute long 2018 hit "I Love it".
"[T]here has never been this kind of financial incentive to make shorter songs," tweeted Mark Richardson, the former editor of the music criticism site Pitchfork. Stuffing more diminutive songs into an album is simply more remunerative than having a bunch of long ones.
What's more, the top 10% of artists—like Drake and Ed Sheeran, who have tracks exceeding one billion plays—dominate 99% of streams. After royalties have been split amongst everyone, including the writers, producers, and performers, that doesn't leave the remaining 90% with much revenue, so volume matters. (Spotify declined to comment.)
Jeff Ponchick, founder of Repost Network, a digital distributor that connects artists to platforms like Spotify and SoundCloud, tells Quartz that since one stream typically earns the same no matter the track length, there's an incentive to create shorter songs to garner as many streams as possible. "This is a total strategy to game the system," Ponchick said. Across Repost's more than 5,000 artists and the numerous platforms they partner with, Ponchick said "the artists who do well with us are artists who put out content frequently and content that's shorter in length."
The trend is most prominent in rap music
Rap songs from newer artists are getting shorter even more quickly than other genres. "Part of it is there's an entire sort of beat-making culture," Ponchick said. After someone writes a beat and licenses it out for someone to rap over, it's more efficient to keep things short and impactful, then move on. "There's a real production component to it," Ponchick said, when it comes to "churning out beats and selling licenses."
Rap is also currently the most popular music genre, so it's fertile ground for new content—and as always, the more streams, the better.
The instant gratification age?
Besides the impact of streaming, short songs might just be part of the culture of the digital age. There are many reports that humans' attention spans are shortening, though they have been widely disputed. Still, one cure for boredom is varition: Listeners are more likely to listen through an entire album because short songs mean that the next new track is never too long away, which works even if the album as a whole is long in length. (Cycling through a whole record ups streaming revenue too.)
But according to an analysis by the data scientist Michael Tauberg, this trend isn't all that new: it can be observed for most of the last two decades. Other music industry observers believe that shorter songs may be a result of more consumer choice—songs need to be more compact and catchy to stand out in the crowd.
Then again, music has always changed with technology. Early phonographs could only hold about two to three minutes of music, so as a result, that was the length of the typical song from the 1920 to 1950s. The introduction of the LP record, and then the tape and the CD, made it possible to have longer songs, with each medium's larger storage capacity. Now in the age of streaming, technology and economics seem to be sending us back towards brevity.
And maybe brevity is becoming an art form in itself. Rap artist Tierra Whack's debut album, Whack World, shows that the concept of the super short song can be an artistic challenge in and of itself. The album consists of 15 tracks, all exactly one minute in length, and each is paired with a one-minute long video (the maximum duration allowed on Instagram). "It stretches the limits of one-minute songs," the New Yorker wrote.
Poll Is shorter sweeter? |
Today's email was written by Dan Kopf and Aisha Hassan, edited by Jessanne Collins, and produced by Luiz Romero.
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