The analysis on the rankings of the last few years suggests yes, and it has to do with - you guessed it - the music in streaming
Between 2013 and 2018 the average length of the songs in the Billboard Hot 100, the most cited for international pop music, has dropped from 3 minutes and 50 seconds to 3 minutes and 30 seconds. The calculations made them the American site Quartz, which also analyzed the duration of a series of famous pop and hip hop records of the last few years to show that pop songs are getting shorter.
This is not really new: critics and music experts have long highlighted this phenomenon, attributing its main causes to the expansion of streaming music services. Last year, in fact, the streaming has exceeded the digital downloads and sales of physical copies of the albums regarding the total revenues of the world record industry. Services like Spotify and Apple Music have tens of millions of paying subscribers in the world (the most recent data date back to last summer, when the two services had 83 and 40 million subscriptions respectively).
The way in which the artists collect from the streams follows different logics than the traditional supports: it is estimated that their actual profit for each single reproduction is between 0.004 and $ 0.008. Streaming services consider a song "played back" when the listener exceeds a certain threshold of seconds, generally around 30. These are very low figures, and in fact the music industry market has been inexorably shrinking for years: but above all it is a type of reproduction that has changed the logic followed by the artists. To simplify a lot: for 15 minutes of reproduced music, an artist who has made five 3-minute songs will earn more than one who has made three 5-minute songs.
Of course there are many artists who prefer to continue to follow different logics, and decide the duration of their songs on more "artistic" bases. And there are artists who do both. Another thing to consider is that it is not news that the support given by listeners influences the average duration of the songs: up until the fifties the records could contain a maximum of three minutes of music on each side, and in fact the songs did not exceed them hardly ever. Things changed radically in the sixties with the spread of LP, which could hold a few tens of minutes per side, for the joy of progressive rock bands, which without that kind of support could not make their songs long. Cassettes and CDs further extended these possibilities,
One of the most critically acclaimed albums in 2018 was Whack World by American rapper Tierra Whack, made up of 15 one-minute songs each. It is a record all in all niche and sought after, so there are good reasons to believe that it was a predominantly artistic choice: but it is representative of a general trend. Last year ye came out , the latest record by rapper Kanye West: it lasted less than 24 minutes, against 66, 40 and 68 of his three previous albums. Quartz has also analyzed the records of Kendrick Lamar, the most celebrated and successful rapper of recent years: in Good Kid, MAAD City of 2012 the fifth song came at minute 19. In To Pimp a Butterflyin 2015 it was instead at minute 16, and in Damn of 2017 already at minute 13.
Recently the former director of the music site Pitchfork has endorsed the theory that the main responsibilities of this trend are due to the streaming, writing on Twitter that "there has never been this kind of economic incentive to make shorter songs". In the same discussion, the people responsible for the popular musical podcast Switched On Pop said they were skeptical about the theories that see the causes of this phenomenon in the lower attention span of people today.
There is another point to consider. In the last two years there has been a new musical genre that has reversed the balance of mainstream music, in the United States as in Italy: trap music . The vast majority of the artists who do it are very young and have made themselves known on the internet, on YouTube or SoundCloud, and have always preferred short songs, often under three minutes. The fact that the trap is so popular means that there are more and more songs trap in the rankings of the most listened songs, further reducing the average duration.
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The analysis on the rankings of the last few years suggests yes, and it has to do with - you guessed it - the music in streaming
Between 2013 and 2018 the average length of the songs in the Billboard Hot 100, the most cited for international pop music, has dropped from 3 minutes and 50 seconds to 3 minutes and 30 seconds. The calculations made them the American site Quartz, which also analyzed the duration of a series of famous pop and hip hop records of the last few years to show that pop songs are getting shorter.
This is not really new: critics and music experts have long highlighted this phenomenon, attributing its main causes to the expansion of streaming music services. Last year, in fact, the streaming has exceeded the digital downloads and sales of physical copies of the albums regarding the total revenues of the world record industry. Services like Spotify and Apple Music have tens of millions of paying subscribers in the world (the most recent data date back to last summer, when the two services had 83 and 40 million subscriptions respectively).
The way in which the artists collect from the streams follows different logics than the traditional supports: it is estimated that their actual profit for each single reproduction is between 0.004 and $ 0.008. Streaming services consider a song "played back" when the listener exceeds a certain threshold of seconds, generally around 30. These are very low figures, and in fact the music industry market has been inexorably shrinking for years: but above all it is a type of reproduction that has changed the logic followed by the artists. To simplify a lot: for 15 minutes of reproduced music, an artist who has made five 3-minute songs will earn more than one who has made three 5-minute songs.
Of course there are many artists who prefer to continue to follow different logics, and decide the duration of their songs on more "artistic" bases. And there are artists who do both. Another thing to consider is that it is not news that the support given by listeners influences the average duration of the songs: up until the fifties the records could contain a maximum of three minutes of music on each side, and in fact the songs did not exceed them hardly ever. Things changed radically in the sixties with the spread of LP, which could hold a few tens of minutes per side, for the joy of progressive rock bands, which without that kind of support could not make their songs long. Cassettes and CDs further extended these possibilities,
One of the most critically acclaimed albums in 2018 was Whack World by American rapper Tierra Whack, made up of 15 one-minute songs each. It is a record all in all niche and sought after, so there are good reasons to believe that it was a predominantly artistic choice: but it is representative of a general trend. Last year ye came out , the latest record by rapper Kanye West: it lasted less than 24 minutes, against 66, 40 and 68 of his three previous albums. Quartz has also analyzed the records of Kendrick Lamar, the most celebrated and successful rapper of recent years: in Good Kid, MAAD City of 2012 the fifth song came at minute 19. In To Pimp a Butterflyin 2015 it was instead at minute 16, and in Damn of 2017 already at minute 13.
Recently the former director of the music site Pitchfork has endorsed the theory that the main responsibilities of this trend are due to the streaming, writing on Twitter that "there has never been this kind of economic incentive to make shorter songs". In the same discussion, the people responsible for the popular musical podcast Switched On Pop said they were skeptical about the theories that see the causes of this phenomenon in the lower attention span of people today.
There is another point to consider. In the last two years there has been a new musical genre that has reversed the balance of mainstream music, in the United States as in Italy: trap music . The vast majority of the artists who do it are very young and have made themselves known on the internet, on YouTube or SoundCloud, and have always preferred short songs, often under three minutes. The fact that the trap is so popular means that there are more and more songs trap in the rankings of the most listened songs, further reducing the average duration.
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