The Long Song Swan Song (say that 5x fast)

If Shakespeare was from Boston and wrote a play about modern music, its opening line would probably be: “Popular songs, shall I compare thee to a long-burning candle? Because thou art getting wicked-shawt.”

According to a recent Billboard report, 38% of the top 10 hits so far this year have been sub-three-minutes, compared to 4% in 2016. And that’s just one data point in a long list.

• Since 2000, Billboard Hot 100 songs have trended down from ~4:10 minutes to 3:30. In 2021, the top 50 tracks on Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 averaged 3:07.
• A 2020 analysis of 160,000 Spotify songs dating back to 1930 discovered there was a steady decline in mean song duration from 1990 (4 mins 19 secs) to 2020 (3 mins 17 secs).

🎶⏱ Driving the trend… Tl;dr – no one really knows for sure. But there are a few ideas, the most simple just being that attention spans are shrinking across the board. Per a 2015 research report from Microsoft, the average human attention span was 12 seconds in 2000, but had decreased to eight seconds (one second shorter than a goldfish) by 2013.

Another theory focuses on the money-making incentives for artists. Streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music have grown to comprise 65% of the music industry’s overall revenue, and they pay out royalties on a per stream basis. This calculation doesn’t take overall listening time into account (just initial listening time), potentially giving artists an incentive to create shorter tracks. Plus shortform video apps, like TikTok, Reels, etc., that are being used by artists to drive streams skew towards popularizing song snippets, per Billboard.

🍿 Zoom out: Interestingly enough, at the same time hit songs are getting shorter, the most popular movies are getting longer. A recent What to Watch analysis comparing the historical runtimes of the US box office top-ten found that 2021’s most popular movies were 21 minutes longer than the average runtime of the top-ten movies released in 1981.