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As Streaming Booms, Songs Are Getting Faster and Shorter (japantoday.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A new study finds that pop songs are getting faster as listeners' attention spans diminish. Instrumental openings to songs have shrunk dramatically over the past three decades and, to a lesser extent, the average tempo of hit singles has been speeding up, the research found. Hubert Leveille Gauvin, a doctoral student in music theory at the Ohio State University, analyzed the year-end top 10 on the US Billboard chart between 1986 and 2015. In 1986, it took roughly 23 seconds before the voice began on the average hit song. In 2015, vocals came in after about five seconds, a drop of 78%, he found. In a study published in Musicae Scientiae, the Journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, Leveille Gauvin linked the trend to the rapid rise of Spotify and other streaming sites that give listeners instant access to millions of songs. "It makes sense that if the environment is so competitive, artists would want to try to grab your attention as quickly as possible," he told AFP.
...indicates that songs have only gotten longer and slower since the Ramones put out records in the 70's
She's a lanky one alright
It's too bad, because, being a prog rock fan myself, I've always loved those longer songs of yesteryear; Genesis' Supper's Ready, Pink Floyd's Echoes, King Crimson's Starless and Bible Black.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I listen to Meat Loaf because his songs are too long and his lyrics are too intelligent.
"I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" is 12 minutes long, and nobody knows what "That" means because the meaning of "That" is too plainly stated in the lyrics.
A new study finds that pop songs are getting faster as listeners' attention spans dimi
Tl;DR
Song structure is changing too. Rather than a traditional structure of ABABA, ABACAB, etc... Things have essentially devolved to Chorus, Chorus, Chorus, Outtro.
Meh, Pop is disposable product targeted at the lowest common demoninator anyway. Just opt out.
Bandcamp is a click away. Direct connection to actual artists (with no gatekeepers, so you'll wade through some crap to find the diamonds.)
Short fast songs, eh?. The Ramones and The Minutemen should be topping the charts any day now!
They are attributing a 30-year trend to a company founded 10 years ago? Get this drivel off the front page please.
Played songs 5% faster than normal speed.
AM radio, for you kids, is like streaming today. Singles (45s) and AM radio were for people you just couldn't figure out, while LPs and FM radio for the cool cats.
Not many cool cats. Not many.
Pink Floyd would never make it today...the millennials would tune out after 2 minutes of guitar solos
When music sharing, like Napster, first hit the internet, people using it to listen to and share whole albums. Many of us were die hard music fans who had invested considerable money into our album collections. Then Lars Ulrich and the industry came along and destroyed every digital album sharing community (although one tiny one remains). The services, like iTunes and, later, Spotify, that filled the vacuum are singles based, not albums. So, blame that greedy, shortsighted tool of the industry, Lars Ulrich, for destroying the album. Fuck you, Lars! You music is fucking shitty now too, you piece of shit yuppie, puppet.
IOW pop music has turned to utter compressed shit.
Also among several dozen of people who I know quite well, I'm the only person who has his music collection on his HDD. Others don't bother.
The Angry Samoans and Rudimentary Peni had them beat by a longshot. So sick of you posers who heard about someone with a Misfits 45 and think you're a punker.
Seems like punk music is perfect for today's streaming market.
Some of my friends are a bit younger than I am (mid 20s vs mid 30s) and I've noticed that they rarely listen to a song all the way through. Typically they will skip any instrumental intro, listen to two verses and then move on to the next song, skipping over the bridge and final verse. Which to me would be like going to a movie and only watching the second act.
I find their listening style very jarring. I see most songs (at least the ones I listen to typically) as telling a story with a clear beginning, middle and end. Jumping the intro and last third, for me, would be like reading just a few chapters from a book and then moving on. It bugs me and I find I don't like listening to music with people younger than I am. Not because I dislike the music, but because their short attention spans with relation to the music annoy me. I listen to music to hear the whole song, get the full experience not just catch the chorus.
Just like any other media type (TV, games, etc.) there is always, always a push for acts that have the widest possible mass appeal. This means aiming for a common denominator. This means lots of formulaic "art". That common denominator is roughly:
* simple chord progressions (in particular, the wholly overused I–V–vi–IV progression that transcends nearly all styles of popular western music)
* regular beats
* lots of repetition
* Prominent vocals
* Short length
* LOUD!!!!!!!!
A more interesting study would be to examine individual artists that don't aim for mass appeal (i.e. 'sell out') and see and how their music has changed over time.
And it's not a new thing. Mozart is criticized a lot for being the first "pop artist" in particular because he was very repetitive both within a piece and within his greater body of work. It's what people like, and he was happy to give it to them.
You're a moron.
About 12,500,000 results
Oh well, music doesn't disappear just because there's more.
Long sets of beautiful live music. Highly recommended. Now get off my lawn.
That would be the data collection portion of the study. The analysis comes once data collection is complete.
Further study into a cappella music showed that the voices came in an average of 0 seconds after the song started. Most surprising, this statistic has not changed, ever.
Songs no longer need to leave time at the beginning of the song for the DJ to give a station ID or otherwise talk over the intro to prevent home recording.
You mean "adding up the numbers"?
...as long as I continue to not listen to anything post 21st century! Long live crustism, complacency, and the other tiny voice shitting on the new kid's music of today.
Butt watt anal cyst?
It looks like they are really talking about pop music as a genre here, as the year end Billboard Top 10 usually only includes maybe one or two songs total from rock, hip-hop, country, etc.
But, if you want to talk fast songs, you would be hard pressed to beat the Power Violence sub-genre (it's kind of like a blend of hardcore punk and metalcore with the tempo taken to the max, with a song structure of "Verse 1 and done"). 23 seconds for the whole song is about the upper limit there... anything longer and a power violence drummer would probably have a heart-attack! (Disclaimer: I don't actually enjoy Power Violence. If you wish to learn more about it, you can use the internet to go afflict yourself with it.)
One of the reasons why songs are getting shorter is due to the way digital record sales accounting is being done. If you can make an album with 30 songs, all 2 minutes long, it counts more towards your sales than 15 songs at 4 minutes a pop. When you have services that count as streaming albums (Rather than individual songs), this makes it really easy to add some numbers. If the artists are paid per song, it's just a good financial choice.
Not only that, streaming songs counts towards RIAA platinum record qualifications. It takes 1500 streams from an album to equal 1 an album 'sale'. Make them all short songs, you'll get more digital oompf per album. You could stick 40 short songs on an album, and you see artists doing that sort of thing already.
Q: What's the difference between Frank Sinatra and Walt Disney?
A: Frank sings, Walt disnae.
It says that the leadins are shorter , but is the average song time shorted? Because that would be great. I don't listen to music a lot but by the 3rd chorus I'm sick of whatever is on and I would be psyched if they could just cut the song time in half.
Gave up popular music about 5 years ago and listen to mostly classical. People are still puzzling over Bach 300 years later....
love is just extroverted narcissism
Before FM songs were all about 3-4 minutes (if that) so more tracks could get crammed into the day-parted AM format, sometime in the 60s the FCC implemented a rule forbidding stations from simulcasting their AM feed to FM so owners had to come up with a cheap new format to keep broadcasting. This "cheap new format" turned out to be to just hire a DJ and let them play whatever the hell they wanted, this was called "freeform radio" (whole sides of albums, no specific genres, not-for-radio edits, whatever)
Radio airtime on FM wasn't dominated by singles or top 40 hits, if you wanted to listen to something hip and weird and not mainstream top 40 garbage you'd go to FM... which a lot of people did in the 60s and 70s, over time it changed the kind of music artists wrote. So yeah that 11 minute epic could play on the radio because nobody really was there to stop the DJ, the real radio money was still on AM.
Of course time marched on and FM became dominant, AM took a backseat, and programming shifted at some point in to be as structured as the old AM station formats were.
At the end of the day shorter tracks aren't for the music lover, it's strictly a tool for record labels to cram as much shit in the listener's ear in a block radio format hoping that they'll buy some of it.
I think this is why a lot of us feel like "radio is dead" we remember a time when DJs ruled the waves and played interesting stuff beyond whatever the top 40 / singles charts had to offer.
"It makes sense that if the environment is so competitive, artists would want to try to grab your attention as quickly as possible,"
There aren't any instrumentals because most "artists" today can't play a musical instrument or even sing. Concerts are just a backtrack with someone dancing around and lip-synching.
We are well on the way back to the "2 Minute Masterpiece" days of the early 1960's.
Most of the Beatles big hits (and songs generally) were 2 minutes give or take a few sec. for the first few albums.
It was not until the rise of the "Album" with The Beach Boys "Pet Sounds" the Beatles "Sgt. Pepper" that longer songs began to creep into radio (the ONLY distribution method at the time.)
With the advent of FM stations in the mid-70's (that at the time, did not have to cater to Advertisers as much) longer formats like Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" and "concept albums" in general became very popular (RUSH 2112 for example.)
The rise of MTV in the 80's brought back the shorter song format simply due to COST as longer videos were just too expensive and they wanted to rotate faster to be able to show more advertising.
Now, with attention spans getting shorter and shorter (and sound quality just an afterthought for most using cheap ear-buds) we are sliding back to the 2-minute format again simply because music is just "background noise" for most and not the active listening it was in the late 60's and 70s (thus the rise of "dance music" and "techno" etc. Don't get me started on Disco. It was and remains an abomination of "Factory-Produced Music" and the current "dance music" is just the latest version of it.)
There are longer pieces available, but not in the Pop genre.
I think this probably has more to do with dj/dance culture than streaming. DJ's mix songs of the same/similar tempo to create long sets where kids can dance continuously for extended periods of time. Songs with long or off-tempo intros and outros are not conducive to that, and even if they are, will often have the intro and outro cut to get to the "good stuff", ie. the beat they can mix into their set. Even if the DJ/Dance culture isn't directly influencing artists to shorten their intros, the DJ remixes then enter the pop music ecosystem, and skew the data directly.
While you'd probably want to commend them for their positive attitude, it appears quite a lot of rap artists suffer from a mental disorder which results in an urge to be the center of attention. Let's call it the "Look at meeeee! Look at meeeeee!" complex. So when the music starts they have this uncontrollable urge to blurt out "Yeah!" within the first few seconds (at least it's better than "No!"). If that was taken as "start of voice" these results are skewed.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Next they'll have minitunes!
That would be the data collection portion of the study. The analysis comes once data collection is complete.
No, that's barely scratching the surface.
This "study" also carefully set a timeframe 30 years back, just long enough to include the rise of the "web" but exclude 30 years of previous data points.
The reality is that this trend started in Pop music back in the late 70's and early 80's, and really started gaining steam in the 90's. The only reason it SEEMS like it has anything to do with Streaming is because "dance" style music also started hitting the mainstream in the early 00's. The correlation here actually ties in more closely with the rise of the use of MDMA (ecstacy) and the growing popularity of "hip-hop" club scenes, and in recent years the entry of 'dubstep' onto the Pop scene.
I was going to write a post here about a punk album but then slashdot told me too many junk characters, so fuck it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Traffic albums also got worn down by repeated plays. But Allman Bros, Grateful Dead..., never a need to skip to the next track. Just let it play from start to end.
Pop music is autotuned s***. The more obnoxious and annoying it is, the more overplayed it is, evidently the more money making it is.
Elvis starts singing within 1 second on most his hits, and his average hit is only 3 minutes long... But he is the King for a reason!
Butt watt anal cyst?
But what Anal Cunt released is even faster and shorter than what is playing nowadays on Spoofy. Are we headed toward a grindcore future?
Which is sex, violence, sex, drugs, sex, violence, sex, and sex.
Popular music has been about "sex and sex and sex and sex" since 1978 if not earlier, if "Shattered" by The Rolling Stones is to be believed.
Yes, because it's so much quicker and more convenient to say "listened to them with a watch, sheet of paper and a pencil and adding up the numbers" than it is to say "analysed"...
Seriously, go kill yourself. You are worthless.
There doesn't seem to be anything in the article about tempo. Just about the length of time it takes before the vocal enters.
Tempo is a specific musical term, having to do with the frequency of basic beats (usually measured in quarter-notes per minute). It has nothing to do with whether drums, keyboards, or vocals are making the sound.
It makes sense that if the environment is so competitive, artists would want to try to grab your attention as quickly as possible
In other words, we want the "artists" singing right away because we know we don't promote bands anymore that play music and need talent to play a challenging instrumental, and so we want the only talent we are promoting to be doing something in the songs sooner so that you are not listening to a studio/backup band.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
BAH!
CCCP Fedeli Alla Linea made them look like pikers.
Dance began in the early 1980's.
I know it can take a while for things to catch on in America but I'm sure there was dance doing ok there before 00..
Soon we'll be listening to music as they do in the 'demolition man' movie, where it's basically 'catchy' jingles everybody sings along with.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
More to the point, what's the point of having a DJ?
They rarely tell you what you were listening to, and certainly at this point in time, they play from such a restricted and pre-selected shortlist that there's no point in listening unless you want to be drowned in endlessly repetitive inflictions of carefully selected pop stars, and yes, they talk right over the music. You did that in my house, you'd find yourself outside the door, coat in hand.
Streaming killed music radio in my home. Or to look at it another way, corporate erosion of radio stations killed it. Or both, I suppose.
I remember the WNEW/FM (NYC) glory days very well, when progrock was the general theme and the DJs actually knew what they were doing, and kept you informed about it. Those days are gone and WNEW is now a typical repetitive shithole. But now my car stereo connects to my phone, which contains many gigabytes of actual quality music, and I can cruise from one coast to another without a repeat or having rap / etc. inflicted on me. Or driving out of range.
So music radio... it's dead, but so what. At this point, it's like mourning tape cassettes.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The researchers should not be inferring a causal relationship. Pop music is fad-heavy, influenced by about a zillion factors, and has it's own cycles. They should have gone back to at least 1956, and included social, political and economic indicators.
Ha. I have a Ramones CD "All that stuff and more Vol1" and it has 33 tracks on a single CD, the longest song is about 2 minutes. Fast? Yep! Everysong is a blast (both in terms of speed and power). :D
Songs are getting faster? No, advertising is slowly being proven to be ineffective in a saturated environment. That is the message being sent here.