Do you feel like you’re burning through songs at a greater rate these days? Then good news: you’re not just getting old and impatient with the young people’s music: songs are genuinely getting shorter.
Quartz have crunched the numbers and concluded that it’s absolutely happening, pointing out that the average length of a top 100 single in 2013 was three minutes fifty seconds, and had shrunk by twenty seconds by 2018, and the proportion of songs by pop artists that don’t crack 2 minutes 30 is growing.
And it’s happening across genres too: pop, hip hop, country, they’re all getting shorter. Just think: ten years ago the 90 second ‘Baby Shark’ would have been 15 minutes long and have six movements. And been by Muse.
Baby shark, doo doo doo doo doo! [four minute guitar solo] Baby shark!
Why is this? It’s mainly economics.
Spotify, Apple and other streaming services now make up a staggering 75 per cent of revenues, and they pay per play. so it makes far more sense to have lots of short songs than epic Pink Floyd-style freak outs.
So if nothing else, we should be grateful that it’s saving us from the return of prog rock.