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.

Comments

My research...

[Anonymous Coward]

...indicates that songs have only gotten longer and slower since the Ramones put out records in the 70's

Streaming Music

[Anonymous Coward]

A new study finds that pop songs are getting faster as listeners' attention spans dimi

Tl;DR

30 years?

[Afty0r]

They are attributing a 30-year trend to a company founded 10 years ago? Get this drivel off the front page please.

Re:30 years?

[umafuckit]

I do shudder a bit to think where it will all lead eventually, but the change has been going on for an incredibly long time (likely over a century) so to attribute it to services and companies that have only existed for a decade or two is rather nonsensical.

I wouldn't worry too much, these trends are apparently based on very mainstream stuff. "Hit songs" as the TFA puts it. There'll always be niches where these trends don't hold sway.

Re:30 years?

[green1]

The niche only applies when you get to control what you hear. "mainstream stuff" is what you're exposed to any time you're in a mall, at a bar, or forced to deal with your own offspring....

Re:30 years?

[AthanasiusKircher]

They are attributing a 30-year trend to a company founded 10 years ago? Get this drivel off the front page please.

I don't see anything in the summary or TFA that says there is a steady 30-year trend. It's just comparing conventions now to what they were a few decades ago. I'd assume the guy has some data showing a more marked shift or acceleration in recent years that corresponds to his trend.

Also, note that technology hasn't only been shifting for the past 10 years. I knew people 20+ years ago who were accessing massive archives of mp3s on communal servers and choosing what to access, what to download for themselves, etc. You don't think they were making decisions on the basis of a few seconds of listening? Only a few years later, mp3 players started to become mainstream, people were managing large archives of tracks, etc. Or, go back to the 80s and the gradual spread of digital tuning on radios. I can recall the first time I saw a car radio with a "scan" function that would play a few seconds on each station before skipping to the next. Sure, older analog tuners might have those programmable buttons that would physically shift the tuner, but digital tuning made it a lot easier to shift the station quickly (or just browse random stations) when a song that didn't sound interesting came on.

So just because Spotify is the one service mentioned in the summary doesn't mean there aren't other technological shifts over the past 30 years that might be driving changes.

Anyhow, it's not only intro to vocals that's changed. I've seen a study looking at trends in the form of songs in the past couple decades, and a much higher percentage of songs foreground a chorus or some other high-intensity section as an early "hook" in the initial part of the track. That goes against the older practice of pop songs which generally had an intro, then a verse which set the tone (and gave some exposition), then perhaps a pre-chorus to build some energy, and finally a much more dramatic chorus. A higher percentage of songs today seem to be front-loading a "hook" of more dramatic music to get listeners to stop changing tracks.

So this trend is a real thing. The structure of music IS changing in response to listening habits. (Which obviously shouldn't be surprising....)

Re:The moral of the story is that

[Known Nutter]

It really whips the llama's ass.

There are young people who have no idea what that means.

Boring alternative theory

[radarskiy]

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.

Re:The moral of the story is that

[imidan]

I used WinAmp for many years, and I still have no idea what that means.

It's a numbers game too

[quietwalker]

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.

Re:It's a numbers game too

[king neckbeard]

It was a scam, but it was a scam to scam the scammers (record labels). If you buy a Pink Floyd LP, you still get an LP full of music.

I gave it up

[avandesande]

Gave up popular music about 5 years ago and listen to mostly classical. People are still puzzling over Bach 300 years later....

Alternate hypothesis

[tomhath]

"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.

It's the DJs!

[ScienceofSpock]

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.

Re:The moral of the story is that

[hamburger lady]

it's a reference to wesley willis, a lo-fi recording artist from chicago who sadly passed away years back. he cut a million songs, most all of which were almost the same and included some reference of "whipping a [insert animal]'s ass".

Re:Look at me, I'm in tatters, I'm a shattered

[serviscope_minor]

Popular music has been about "sex and sex and sex and sex" since 1978 if not earlier

1978? Kids always think they invented sex and music!

Re:Pink Floyd?

[serviscope_minor]

So basically, if "kids these days" don't like the stuff that 'ole gramps likes, then they like all the wrong stuff. But if they do like it, then they are only doing to to be cool and don't really like it. In other words, there's nothing they could do to win your approval.

Fortunately they don't care.