Slashdot Mirror
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.
To be fair most people not stoned of their gourd would tune out after 2 minutes of noodling on the guitar, oddly so would the remaining people stoned off their gourd.
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.