why are songs getting shorter?

Nowadays, a two to four minute songs feel of normal length.When it gets longer it starts to feel “too long”. But it always wasn’t like this. The idea of what the length of song should be has changed over time.

So, has our attention span changed the way we make and listen to music?

To figure this out, i am going to look into the most popular songs over the years and see how has it changed over time.

There is also an interesting difference between the genres of musics. So i will be even analysing the most popular ones: pop and rock. I want to see that if the change in the length of the music has only been in one single genre or in all of them.

Looking into this graph, the main things are:
1) 1961 had the shortest median song duration (song shorter than usual)

2)1970 had the longest individual song

3)1992 had the highest median song duration (song longer than usual)

4)2019 had the shortest individual song

We can see the overall pattern as short-long-short

The reason why songs were short during 1960s:

One reason was simply the technology available at the time. Music had to fit onto physical records, which had a limited amount of space. Early singles could only hold a few minutes of music so there was a limit to how long a song could be.

As times changes this restriction was no longer there so artists could make the lengths of the songs according to their choice.

if technology helped make songs longer, what made them start getting shorter again?

Bands from 1980s/1990s had longer songs because they did no have any restrictions and there were no streaming services back then. Which explains why they had longer songs but in recent times the lengths of the song have reduced mainly because of the streaming services.

Since they have come the number of streams are being given more value. If the song is of lesser duration it will get more streams compared to a song of more duration.

can we blame our shrinking attention spans into this?

Partly. While, it is true that we are constantly switching between different apps, which gives artists to grab our attention easily.

But its not the only reason why such shift has been caused. The streaming services are a bigger reason compared to it

Billboard data shows that the average hot 100 song over the years fell from around 4 minutes in the 1990s to 3:15 in the 2020s and that decline happened across genres.

But, for rock music, it is a bit different. Rock music tends to be longer than pop music. It has also changed but as drastically as pop music.

Also, pop music dominates the mainstream charts. Most of the songs on them are pop.

OVERALL:

Rock → usually longer , gotten shorter

Pop → usually shorter, bigger drop in length

It doesn’t. Billboards only shows that shorter songs have become more common among mainstream charts.

The top 100s don’t include every popular song. A song not being there doesn’t mean people don’t listen to it.

Take some of the most popular songs ever:

Master of Puppets — Metallica (8:35 mins)
Hey Jude — The Beatles (7:11 mins)

So just because a song is long, it doesn’t mean people will find it boring or not listen to it.

This depends from person to person. For me 4-6 minutes would be a sweet spot. The duration of a song doesn’t determine the quality. Both long and short songs can sound good, it just depends on the person listening to it.

This is where the way we consume music becomes important.

If a friend recommends you a song to you, you will most probably listen to the entire thing.

If you discover some song from some reel you only know that one specific part of the song.

This also brings. me to the point why most people find long songs “boring”.

If you are already familiar with a song and like it then the length of the song doesn’t really matter but when you only know one part of the song the real problem comes in. A long song has many part to it, many people will listen to the intro and get bored because of it which causes them to skip the entire thing

I know that i am emphasising a lot on long songs but i have my reasons to why i like them.

Lets take master of puppets into consideration. The person starts out thinking they are in control but slowly the addiction takes over place and the person becomes the puppet instead.

The substance becomes into the “master” and the person using it becomes the “puppet”.

This whole thing requires a build up to which is why it is longer than most songs.

Also a long songs doesn’t feel like the same thing the entire time. It can have different instrumentals at the same time and still have the whole song connected together.