The Economics of Streaming is Making Songs Shorter (qz.com) 133
Popular music is shrinking. From 2013 to 2018, the average song on the Billboard Hot 100 fell from 3 minutes and 50 seconds to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds. From a report: Six percent of hit songs were 2 minutes 30 seconds or shorter in 2018, up from just 1% five years before. Take Kendrick Lamar. One of the world's most popular musicians right now. The average track length on Lamar's breakout 2013 album good kid, m.A.A.d city is 5 minutes 37 seconds. All are 3 minutes 30 seconds or longer. On Lamar's most recent album DAMN., the average song is 3 minutes and 57 seconds. DAMN. won the Pulitzer Prize for music, going to show that this trend isn't necessarily lowering the quality of music. It's not just Lamar. The trend can be seen in albums of music's biggest stars, like the rapper and singer Drake, perhaps pop music's most dominant force.
THis is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
In the hey day of AM radio the songs aimed for 2 min 30 seconds. It's not economics. And on top of that, comparing averages to individual songs is also silly. Half fo them will be longer than the median. Lastly Album oriented music tends to be longer than radio/stream oriented music because the former has a larger story telling context and the latter is about a catchy vibe.
Re: (Score:2)
"Sooo... bye, bye, Miss Americ..."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, this is another example of modern music going backwards.
Modern music started out short, and then bands started pushing those boundaries with great songs that took much more time.
I'm guessing we'll never seen the likes of the songs you mentioned, and never see another Bohemian Rhapsody, or Stairway to Heaven, etc, etc.
The kids of today have the attention span of a g
Re: (Score:2)
Re: THis is stupid (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I always liked the shorter greatest-hits edit of Pink Floyd's Echoes more than the full 20 minute version.
I don't want to sound judgmental but you are uncultured swine and likely lack the ability to appreciate the full cut of 'Echoes', anyways.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm guessing we'll never seen the likes of the songs you mentioned, and never see another Bohemian Rhapsody, or Stairway to Heaven, etc, etc.
Most modern music does not seem to be played, at all, by musicians. I think this is the key difference.
Old bands like Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, hell even David Lee Roth get on stage and put on a god damned show whereas Lady Gaga gets on stage and sings some songs while people that dont matter and wont be seen by you ever again dance beside her.
The showmanship Lady Gaga has is changing outfits between sets.
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Old bands like Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, hell even David Lee Roth get on stage and put on a god damned show whereas Lady Gaga gets on stage and sings some songs while people that dont matter and wont be seen by you ever again dance beside her.
Translation: "Today's music sucks because I'm old".
There was a lot of shitty music in the past too, it's just that the crap tends to get forgotten. Also, while Lady Gaga might not be your cup of tea, she is actually a very talented, classically trained musician. The vapid pop star thing is just an act*, which she's clearly very good at, because you obviously fell for it.
* Also, Taylor Swift [msn.com] was never a poor ole country gal, with bills to pay and nothing figured out, in case you fell for that one too.
Re: (Score:3)
Translation: "Today's music sucks because I'm old".
If thats what you get out of pointing out that todays music isnt played by people... its played by sequencers.. what does that tell us about you.
Re: (Score:1)
When you were back in the time you came from, did you notice a lot of songs had tambourines in them? That's because the sound of the tambourine is at a frequency that works well in crappy am radio in the terrible gas guzzling steel boxes people used to drive around.
The thing is it may be fashionable to w
Re:THis is stupid (Score:4, Funny)
If songs are too short, then we'll never find out what Meatloaf won't do for love!
I'd do anything for love, but I won't cheat on you (Score:3)
Even in the chorus before the first verse, listeners learn two of the things Meat Loaf's character won't do are "lie to you" and "forget the way you feel right now". Later "do it better than I do it with you" and "be screwing around" are added. I understand all this to mean he won't "cheat", or swing without Lorraine Crosby's character's permission. It wouldn't be infeasible for a shorter edit of the song to keep the same message.
Re:I'd do anything for love, but I won't cheat on (Score:4, Insightful)
Only the truly great songs. Regardless of length.
If there's no message, it's just fluff.
And fluff is just fine, fluff becomes the filler in-between, and must outnumber songs with a message in order for those songs to transcend the mundane and become the great songs in the first place.
Without the fluff, the meanings would just be lost in the noise.
It is hardly infantile.
Re: (Score:1)
The translation of the name is roughly "sonata in the style of a fantasy" -- one of the greatest musical pieces ever written, and there is no fucking meaning is sight.
Are you now going to claim that this isnt one of the, and I quote you, "truly great
Re: (Score:3)
So we now see the true definition of infantile.
I'm a musician, and I disagree. The sonic and the lyric are intertwined to create the work.
Since you cannot argue like a rational human being, we can safely ignore your opinion.
Re:THis is stupid (Score:5, Informative)
I am the entertainer
I come to do my show
You've heard my latest record
It's been on the radio
Ah, it took me years to write it
They were the best years of my life
It was a beautiful song
But it ran too long
If you're gonna have a hit
You gotta make it fit
So they cut it down to 3:05
Billy Joel, 1974
Not economics (Score:2)
THe logic of the article also makes no sense. The article says that people are paid per song not per minute so this makes shorter songs better. ummm no. People are not looping your song to fill an hour, so the length of your song has nothing to do with how often it gets played. And if there were pressure from that economy then streaming companies would prefer to stream longer songs so they pay less royalties to fill an hour. Artists would prefer to make longer songs so their songs would occupy more tim
Re: (Score:2)
SO there's no economic pressure here.
You think the music industry doesn't have a say in this? They are the major beneficiaries of shorter songs: More money per hour paid by the streaming services. Who cares what an individual artist gets. This is a bulk business.
Quite correctly, you point out that it's the music industry that benefits, and I think it's worth mentioning that he artists are the last to be paid, in most cases they are not paid, as they owe money to the label which is recovered through royalties or full-price album sales (discount album sales earn $0 towards the artist's account with the label). Also the labels own the copyrights to all the artist's music ( signing over the copyrights is the major condition of signing with a label). If (and that's a bi
Re: (Score:3)
If everyone is producing shorter songs, it means that over some amount of time a user streams, they're more likely to have played some artist's song. All artists cooperatively adopting this strategy means that everyone gets paid more. You also assume that longer song lengths result in greater occupation of listener's attention (whatever that means), which even if true, doesn't result in more revenue (at least not directly) for the artists. Maybe you could
Prisoner's Dilemma and Nash equilibrium (Score:2)
There's no incentive for any one artist to go shorter. An artist only benefits from other artists shortening their songs but you get no benefit from shortening yours. So why would any artist choose to shorten their art for the benefit of others but not themselves? Ad supported streaming services that I have seen simply display ads on the screen in the player not interrupt the music. Perhaps there are some but I'd doubt those would have any affect on the collective behavior of the industry as a whole.
Re: (Score:1)
Shorter song = less work, for the same pay. There's your selfish incentive.
Then consider, it's not just the artists making these decisions. Producers and studios also get a say.
Everyone involved has an incentive to make sure as many different songs get crammed into any given playing time as possible.
Re: (Score:2)
You get a slight benefit from shortening your own songs from people who play your albums/playlists, rather than compilation playlists/albums.
However, the ratio of single-artist playlists played to compilation playlists played is probably heavily tilted in favour of the compilations...
Re: (Score:2)
There's no incentive for any one artist to go shorter.
Not necessarily. Take 2112 by Rush for example, a 20 minute song. It would make sense to break it up into its scenes (Overture, The Temples of Syrinx, etc.) for more money. (Thankfully that they haven't as the poor shuffle only free Spotify accounts would suck even more.)
An album may also have more numerous shorter tracks and get more money per full listen.
The big record labels get money regardless of which of their artists gets played. It's a good chance that the next thing you play is under the same label
Re: (Score:2)
granted that there's a some point where a song is so long it interferes with itself. But that's not ordinarily the case. And 20 minute songs really are in their own class
Re: (Score:2)
All artists cooperatively adopting this strategy means that everyone gets paid more.
If they did, then the one artist that doesn't cooperate and has the longer song STILL also gets paid more,
and derives a benefit that listeners spend more time hearing their music = greater familiarity = greater probability of like/favorite button getting clicked.
Re: (Score:3)
The logic is pretty simple. Someone sits down to work for an hour and decides to stream some Lamar. If the average Lamar song is 5 minutes, only 12 songs are played. If the average song is 3 minutes, that's 20 songs. Almost twice as many plays, so twice as much money for Lamar. Even if they don't exclusively listen to just Lamar, if they're on a playlist with different artists and, say, 20% of it is Lamar, Lamar will get 4 plays instead of 2-3, so it ends up being better for everyone (in a per-song royalty
Re: (Score:2)
It's not exactly uncommon to play through an entire album. A 15 song album hence earns 50% more than a 10 song album per such play through. That seems like an economic incentive to make albums of many short songs rather than fewer long songs.
I'm pretty sure you can play everything by an artist on most streaming platforms too which would magnify that even further.
Re: (Score:2)
More songs per hour, more play time for everyone on average.
People cant make more time to listen to music.
Put more different music in the same time.
Thats a win.
Re: (Score:2)
We also need to keep in mind that the current payment model isn't some sort of universal law of nature, and the streaming services can switch top paying per hour listed if people start making tons of 20 second songs.
RTFA (Score:2)
The article concludes with many different possible explanations. You're attacking a straw man, not the article logic.
Re: THis is stupid (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why the fuck would you want the limited words in the title+summary to be wasted on pointless repetition?
Too dumb to remember the title by the time you finish reading the summary?
Re: (Score:2)
Stop complaining, given the current state of popular music it is moving in the right direction. My hope is that it falls below 1 minute.
Re: (Score:1)
So said the people that came before you, and the people that came before them. Yes, yes, the kids will get off your lawn, gramps.
Re: (Score:2)
Music released on early LPs, for example, could be no more than 5 minutes long because a 78 was five minute
When the LP came out, the album was 15-20 minutes or so per side. Multiple tracks were recorded per album, and it became customary for people to expect around 10 tracks per album. Radio was a force, and they also wanted tracks around 3 minutes so they would not lose the kids attention. As must as old people want to blame TV and comput
Re: (Score:2)
That would have to be sold to pay off the production and recording loans the artist had with the music company.
Quality mattered as the person had to go out and buy the product.
A set number of product every month.
Every artist could slowly work away at their loans.
With digital its about more music and getting a person to listen to as much new music as they can.
They might buy something.
The digital ne
Re: (Score:2)
I reiterate music profit is mostly made of kids with short attention spans buying what their friends buy so they can fit in and be popular.
Re: (Score:2)
You're mixing up means and medians. The mean does not necessarily correlate to the median. Given a set of song lengths in minutes S={1,1,1,1,11} the median length is 1 minute, the average length is 3 minutes. All songs are as long or longer than the median in this case, but only 1 song is longer than the average, while 4 are shorter.
Given a different set, S={1,1,2,4,22}, Then the median length is 2 minutes, and we do see that about half are below, and half above, but the average is 15 minutes! With again, 4
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps it's being anonymous that reduces your reading comprehension. I'll quote him and add my own emphasis:
In the hey day of AM radio the songs aimed for 2 min 30 seconds. It's not economics. And on top of that, comparing averages to individual songs is also silly. Half fo them will be longer than the median. Lastly Album oriented music tends to be longer than radio/stream oriented music because the former has a larger story telling context and the latter is about a catchy vibe.
I also provided a few examples showing there isn't much correlation between the median and the mean, they can be vastly different as they are showing different information for the data. A standard deviation would be a bit more enlightening, as the average distance of each value from the mean.
The mean is correlated to the data, and the median is correlated to the data, does not mean that the mean and
Re: (Score:2)
Album music is longer because customers would complain they were ripped off if they bought a typically-priced LP that could hold 45 minutes but only contained 25 minutes (to barely justify using both sides). Or a CD which could hold 70 minutes, but only had 30 minutes of music on it.
Streaming and a la carte music shopping has meant people c
Re: (Score:2)
In the hey day of AM radio the songs aimed for 2 min 30 seconds. It's not economics. And on top of that, comparing averages to individual songs is also silly. Half fo them will be longer than the median. Lastly Album oriented music tends to be longer than radio/stream oriented music because the former has a larger story telling context and the latter is about a catchy vibe.
Based on an interview I viewed (BBC, Top of the Pops, commenting on the "rule breaking song length" in the Who's first "Rock Opera" which featured long song lengths) Pete Townsend states (more or less) that "everybody knows a song should be two minutes fifty seconds".
But yeah, you got it basically correct.
Wouldn't that also (Score:2)
be more profitable for compamies selling tracks for download at 99c ?
whats the average 'album' length these days?
I buy my music from amazon then download it - I don't stream
ELP's Karn Evil 9 should set the standard (Score:2)
If a song is less than 29 minutes and 37 seconds (which takes up one and a third sides of a record) then it's not worth listening to. Or at the very least, coding to as I am now (although to be totally accurate, I'm waiting for a build to finish).
Three Minutes, thirty seconds? Bah! Poseurs.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes but it is so monotonous it bzip compresses down to a 4KB file and you can put 180,000 copies of it on a digital CD
Re: (Score:2)
If a song is less than 29 minutes and 37 seconds Or at the very least, coding to as I am now
Thank you - I'm going to have a listen to that. May I suggest a listen to Mars Volta's Cassandra Gemini [youtube.com] at 32 minutes plus it is a work of genius. Features Flea from RHCP playing a Trumpet solo that has to be heard to believed.
Just fucking awesome.
Re: (Score:2)
If a song is less than 29 minutes and 37 seconds (which takes up one and a third sides of a record) then it's not worth listening to. Or at the very least, coding to as I am now (although to be totally accurate, I'm waiting for a build to finish).
Three Minutes, thirty seconds? Bah! Poseurs.
To be fair, Karn Evil Nine is really three tracks welded together. It is certainly good for a coding marathon, though...
Who? (Score:1)
Who the fuck is Kendrick Lamar?
Gagga la vida (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It's 5:15 sec, which reminds me The Who.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
but it's only 5 minutes
Re: (Score:1)
If you like short songs like that, then Procol Harem put out "In Held 'Twas on I" on the Shine on Brightly album. Jethro Tull put out Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play. Both of which took both sides of an album at 22 minutes per side. Damn near any live version of a Led Zeppelin song will be around that long as well.
If your looking for long songs and like classical music, 17 minutes isn't difficult to find at all. Wagner's Der Ring is a 15 hour opera. In the past it was all but impossible to find a re
Long term trend is actually the reverse (Score:5, Informative)
Long term trend is actually the reverse; although it might well be starting to turn around now for reasons that may or may not be related to streaming economics... but my grandparents and parents generations both lived with most hit music being sub-3 minutes. While my generation and my kids saw it climb to 4+ so its hardly a big deal its down a bit.
2010's: 4'26"
2000's: 4'10"
1990's: 4'14"
1980's: 4'08"
1970's: 3'55"
1960's: 2'59"
1950's: 2'36"
1940's: 2'41"
https://thelister.blogspot.com... [blogspot.com]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I think if you give this some thought you will see that it is exactly the format that has always driven the length of recordings.
From the 20's 78 RPM records were limited to about 3:10 by the size of the disk and almost all were less than 3:00.
When AM radio playing 45 RPM records became popular for music songs were 3:00 because that made the number of ads constant.
When LP's and FM radio gained popularity in the later 60's and into the 70's songs got longer as the contemporary styles were no longer constrain
Re: (Score:2)
If you work hard enough, you can fit six or seven minutes on one side of a 78. The most obvious way is by expanding it to 12" instead of 10". However, this means mastering it at a lower volume level (thus more noise) so generally it was just expansion of the disc without groove packing, and that gave only about 5 and a half minutes. Holst led a performance of The Planets that was much, much faster than anyone performs it today, specifically so each movement would fit on one side of such a record.
Re: (Score:3)
There's just too much handwaving going on here. You are right, the format in the 20s sure, was limited by the 78.
But everything since then? How do LPs, CDs, or FM radio affect track length? Radio programming is radio programming regardless of band and the push for ads over time has just grown stronger if anything; so there's simply no reason for the market to push to longer tracks. Radio wants ad breaks, and lots of tracks per hour so the audience stays enaged.
Video's rise and fall with the rise and fall of
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed.
The music industry is so old and 'legacy' that it still needs to think in terms of 'tracks sold'. They have a formula for counting streams and turning them into supposed tracks being sold (which they presumably then use to divide up the coppers down the back of the sofa to pay the artists). I believe it's something like 600 streams = one sale.
So... if you're a record company, then shorter streams mean more money - a person listening to a playlist will get through more tracks, and so will burn through
Re: (Score:2)
Long term trend is actually the reverse; although it might well be starting to turn around now for reasons that may or may not be related to streaming economics... but my grandparents and parents generations both lived with most hit music being sub-3 minutes. While my generation and my kids saw it climb to 4+ so its hardly a big deal its down a bit.
2010's: 4'26"
2000's: 4'10"
1990's: 4'14"
1980's: 4'08"
1970's: 3'55"
1960's: 2'59"
1950's: 2'36"
1940's: 2'41"
https://thelister.blogspot.com... [blogspot.com]
1850's: 30+ (a concerto tends to go for half an hour).
When recorded media came along, it introduced a little bit of a constraint over how much audio could be recorded, but this hasn't been a real issue since cassette tape, with streaming and digital media, there isn't a limit on length. Songs that were generally performed in concert were sometimes shortened for recording but songs that have been 4 minutes or more were commonplace since at least the 40's. They were just performed live rather than recorde
Makes perfect sense... (Score:4, Funny)
...the shorter a rap song is, the less bad it is. Now if they can hit 0:00 it'd be perfect!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So you're saying that Rap is Homeopathic? :)
rap isn't a song (Score:2, Interesting)
Nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
In the middle of last century, the 45 rpm record did the exact same thing. Before that, pop songs would have long intros and the singer might not come in until the third chorus. For example, here's a Tommy Dorsey/Sinatra record from the 40's that was a big hit (it's a cool tune, so you should listen to it):
https://youtu.be/M_EPgmVaLWA [youtu.be]
I wish some Tommy Dorsey/Sinatra tunes could have made it into the Fallout games. The song still comes in at 3:19, but the structure is pure 78 rpm.
Once the 45 rpm came out, it was one measure and the singer comes in. Verse/chorus/verse/chorus. Not even a bridge sometimes.
https://youtu.be/-eHJ12Vhpyc [youtu.be]
It has been said that 3 minutes should be the outer limit for a pop song. One of the greatest records of all time had an average song length of about 2 minutes, and many songs much shorter. Here is a great song from The Ramones' self-titled first record that comes in at exactly 1:30. No fat, no filler, all pumping pure pop goodness.
https://youtu.be/K6GAGdBiJF0 [youtu.be]
Obvious man is obvious (Score:2)
'Love to Love You Baby' Album Version (Score:2)
Cause I'm gonna get my money's worth dammit!
Correlation is still not causation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The popular singles may be getting shorter, and streaming may be becoming more common, but where's the proven connection? Perhaps shorter songs are simply more "attractive" to the demographic with a reduced attention span, and artists and their record companies are aiming for that market?
You can't formally prove it without either an experiment or an admission by the people producing the stuff. However, the shift reported in the article is large and is likely to have a solid reason behind it. Saying that shorter songs are more attractive sounds like a bit of a fluffy explanation: they listen to whatever they're fed. I would suggest by Occam's Razor that the large reported shift is best explained by the music industry seeking to cash in as much as possible, since this is consistent with previ
Royalties (Score:2)
I'm under the impression that royalties are per-play. So if songs are shorter, fans will listen to more songs, many of them from the same record company, so the record company wants shorter songs.
I would think that royalties should be for the amount of time streamed. If your song is six minutes long, you get twice the royalties of a three minute song, but only if it's streamed as many times and listed to all the way through. (And if someone skips, they get the royalties for the portion listened to.)
Someo
It is not the song duration, but the intro. (Score:5, Insightful)
Streaming has changed modern music - but it is the song introduction that has changed, not the duration. A song has to "hook" people within the first 15 seconds or else the listener will hit next. When this happens, the streaming service does not have to pay the artist. With traditional radio, songs could start up slowly. This gave artists had more flexibility in how the music was presented. With streaming, artists have around 15 seconds to sell their tune. It is limiting - but the price one has to pay for the way streaming currently operates.
**Note; I have forgotten the exact time so 15 seconds might be off. But it is close to 15.
Re: (Score:2)
This phenomenon started before streaming. There was a post on Slashdot a couple years ago about how the time before the lyrics start up is way down compared to the 80s. The conclusion was the same in that the idea was to hook the listener quickly. However, the reason was different, likely so that you pay attention or don't switch to another radio station.
My suspicion is that the mix of 2018 music leans more toward genres that typically run shorter. Another possibility is that songs are being made shorter to
So what's your point? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Advertisements now have a few minutes of 'show' inbetween them, you mean.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Drake? Really? (Score:1)
I thought the only reason I kept hearing his crap music was because I had the misfortune to have landed in Toronto. Is he really pop musics most dominant force?
That's fucking depressing.
"songs" (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Fewer repetitions (Score:2)
So they'll repeat the same lyrics 3 times instead of 4 or 5? Is that what you're saying?
That's why I pass (Score:2)
As an old fart, I prefer to listen to a local BC that plays even Pink Floyd's Echoes and Atomheart Mother, both of them over 23 minutes.
pop songs (Score:2)
who cares about the length of pop songs? certainly not the people listening to them or the mentioned 'stars' wouldn't be the stars they are.
Neutral (Score:1)
Perhaps for some genres I would prefer a shorter track length.
It's not like there is any content (Score:2)
There is a limit to the number of ways you can repeat a warble of "oh-oh-oh" before even the most mindless teenager gives up.