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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
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.
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.)
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
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.
Wasted! Youth!
That would be the data collection portion of the study. The analysis comes once data collection is complete.
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.
Amen, brother!
Someone had to do it.
...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.
is better by far than a Wise and productive old age...
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.
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
This is an interesting outline, I will print and show this to some dance instructors that know how music is assembled and get their opinion. I think another aspect is 95% of broadcast stations are owned by ClearChannel, there is no DJ as the day's program is already formatted with pre-selected songs and commercials. There was a time when FCC specified AM and FM broadcast bands had to be mix of rock, news, jazz, classical, country, etc. so entire band is not just one genre. And then there was a time of many independent stations. Old timers remember KFAT in Gilroy, CA that played all kinds of obscure country songs including records from 1930s people would find at garage sales. Station was not exactly polished operations, there were times when staff forget about the record, listeners would have to call in to tell them the record ended (and turntable kept going around and around). They also had a KFAT bumper sticker, "I Found It! and it's hard to find too." (not exactly high power transmitter).
mfwright@batnet.com
"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.
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.
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.'"
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?
Namely "lie to you", "forget the way you feel right now", "do it better than I do it with you", and "be screwing around". One problem is that the radio edit cuts out a lot of those explanatory lines.
Further reading: Mr. Loaf explains what "that" is
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.
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"
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.