Songs are getting shorter | Hacker News Reader

Songs are getting shorter

billboard.com

32 pointslxm52 comments

Songs being 3:30 or less is not a new thing since 2000.

"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, "The Entertainer", 1974.

I remember dating a guy who bragged about how some of the songs on his favorite album was 5 minutes long. I thought that was such a strange detail to care about.

I used to do this a lot and still catch myself doing it sometimes.

Personally I think it comes from not being exposed to a lot of music growing up (my mom is hard of hearing), and just assuming that almost all songs were 2-3 minutes. I'd say that the thought process behind it also has something to do with longer songs requiring more time or dedication to learn all the lyrics, so it feels more special when you know and really enjoy a longer song.

There isn't a single track on Doolittle that hits 4:00, and most are under 3:00.

Same with Pink Flag.

In the 1980's, Minutemen put out a cassette tape with 2 of their LPs, 2 EPs, a couple singles, and a few of their songs from compilations. I think it was a 90 minute cassette tape but they didn't use the whole thing, 62 songs from their first four years as a band that averaged around 1:20 each.

Only one song on the first six Beatles albums is over 3 minutes, and that was 3:09.

Mozart's Alla Turca can be performed in around 3:30, and has tons of repetition.

Even 3 was pushing it. In the 50s 2:30 or less was common.

Long story short, it seems like music is evolving based on the challenges posed by TikTok and Spotify, and other streaming/sharing services. Like other commenters have written, this article also mentions that shortening songs isn't a new thing.

What's new though is the nature of the pressures. Here's the spooky part for me: "If you go to a club and you watch people dance, they only dance to the 15 seconds of a song that’s famous on TikTok,” he says. “For the rest of it, they just sit there.” My mind is blown because I had been listening to a writer on a podcast claim that music is becoming more cerebral and less about moving the body (as in dance).

People have always danced to short tunes with instructions. Like traditional line dances or cotton eyed Joe. What seems to be different now is the lack of instructions.

Music isn't a monolithic thing. If the mainstream music you find on Spotify is coalescing, the independent music you find on Bandcamp is creatively diverging.

Music is so obscenely post-scarcity I don't see how anybody has anything to complain about. There's so much you can listen to exactly the kind you want until the end of time.

And with AI/ML, we're soon to be creating more music in any given month than all of human history to this point [1].

It's going to be very interesting to see what fates await the RIAA, labels, industry awards, streaming giants, top musicians, legacy musicians, and small artists. I think each will navigate the upcoming AI future in a slightly different way. New types of entities will emerge, and many old players will no longer exist in the same shape or form as they do today. If at all.

[1] (I'm furiously working on this, and I know a lot of others are too.)

Suggest optimizing for quality/marketability. There is no shortage of music but hits are rare.

Those are but gradients!

Furiously

It's past midnight and I'm in my office, as I am every night. Though you may have me since I'm sneaking off to HN to comment.

I need to set noprocrast.

Has anyone spun up the track the article discusses? The song could be even shorter, by the time you hit 0:25 you've pretty much experienced it.

Can't say I'm much of a fan, given the track is effectively just a somewhat low effort heavily produced hook. Starting to wonder how much of the zeitgeist is just reputation and spread as opposed to substance. Its making me think of Pentecostalism (i.e. listeners want it to be good).

What I’d actually like to see is more “dynamic” music. the format of a song used to be limited like a book is limited, but then we invented hypertext. Paintings are limited, but then we invented video games. Why can’t music have various interactive parameters, or at least be able to loop to arbitrary lengths? I bet there’s a lot of untapped potential here.

Vinyl records and tapes experimented with this, especially with the ability to have intricate groove paths that allowed songs to have alternate parts that the needle might "randomly" select or loop, or tapes designed to perpetually loop.

Some of those practices are still in use today, on those formats: Jack White's label published his Lazaretto album with a number of vinyl tricks, including two different intro grooves for one of the songs,[1] and the recent milder resurgence in cassettes has gotten people experimenting with old tape-loop styles again.[2][3]

1: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/07/jack-white-ult...

2: https://www.guerrilladigital.cc/2021/03/10/i-spent-the-last-...

3: https://store.crypticcarousel.com/products/6-minute-endless-...

And, of course, there's always video game music which often shifts in reaction to player actions.

now I want to work on a music app that changes your playlist based on heart rate

Björk isn’t the only artist who’s explored this space, but she did an album that’s highly interactive. Less interactive but more chaotic, the Flaming Lips did an album that famously was designed to play on four sound systems. There are other examples I’ve omitted because they’re either speculative or lightning rods for the wrong kind of conversation here, but there are definitely musical artists who’ve either explored this kind of interaction or embraced it as their audience explored it.

If you haven't had the pleasure: https://www.incredibox.com/demo/ may be the band/demo/dynamic music you are pursuing? But much agreed, I think we're at the forefront of exciting new mediums in the audio space.

This reminds me of a paper written in '77 by Donald Knuth about the algorithmic complexity/information content of songs and how it's been reducing using "devices" like the chorus etc. Basically, the idea is that due to compressibility, you can remember a song of length N by remembering just a fraction of N words.

I suppose it's an in-joke of some kind but given that it's from Knuth, there's probably something to learn from it anyway. There's also something philosophical about it. I used to memorise poetry because I enjoyed reciting it out loud dramatically. They were long and complex unlike modern songs which can be easily memorised and hummed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Songs

I find this fascinating, largely because it's so alien to me. I'm only tangentially aware of the TikTok culture. At work we have a channel where people share music they like and what they are currently listening to. It's a very wide variety and most does not seem to follow this trend.

Personally, my favourite album of this year is "The End, So Far" by Slipknot. 12 tracks ranging from 3:23 to 6:16 with an average of 4:48.

Last year's favourite was "Senjutsu" by Iron Maiden. Ten tracks ranging from 4:03 to 12:38 with an average of 8:11. Several of those tracks have an intro longer than the tracks this article discusses.

King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard released a 30 minute album with just two songs this year. There are plenty of artists releasing longer songs nowadays if you look for it

Much better discussion here:

https://www.musicianwave.com/whats-the-average-length-of-a-s...

> "The 45 rpm record came into the scene in 1949 and replaced the 78 rpm record. This fact alone isn’t very relevant to the average length of a song, as both formats could hold “around” 3 minutes of music. However, the continuing popularity of the 45 rpm record may help to explain why hits under 4 minutes are still the norm today."

This song is just six words long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do5vXn_Rap4

Do artists still release radio edits of their singles? Back in the 90s, I was always a little pissed off when my fave bands did that. It was likely their record labels, but still… edited length for airplay is such bullshit.

Edit: I’ll add that I much prefer the single edit for one of my all-time fave tracks, Firestarter by The Prodigy. It’s shorter and harder hitting than the album version.

I would say that it's a necessity for dance/club tracks as they're meant to be mixed/edited on the fly by the DJ and listening to a 7+ minute track in full on the radio/Spotify wouldn't be ideal. On occasion when I'm up for it, I'll 'listen' to tracks by mixing them for myself for an hour or three and see what interesting transitions/mashups might arise. I've thought about getting a Reloop Ready (which is barely wider than a a 14" Macbook) specifically for personal travel use.

Yes they do! In Australia on JJJ radio station I heard them play a radio edit of one of my favourite tracks this year from Odesza

This is the track. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLKoiq6Su-8

I get it, it’s 6 min long and that’s a no no on the top pop radio station.

But I couldn’t believe how the radio edit basically kills the song and all of its movement.

I don’t listen to the radio intentionally (was in someone’s car) and have never heard a radio edit.

Was super disappointing when I cut the first half of the track.

It was definitely their labels. If you want some (not exhaustive but exemplary) insight into the shit labels do to musicians and their music, Steve Albini’s writing on the topic is a great place to start.

This is finally the year of punk on the airwaves

Stairway to Heaven (1971) was 8 minutes long.

People just tolerate the first five and a half minutes to get to the last 2 and a half minutes. Or at least that's what I do :).

I remember an ex girlfriend changing the station once right at about that transition. I felt like someone had just stolen my time, like they'd knocked over a card tower I'd been working on.

And Free Bird (1973) is 9 minutes long, and the bane of Guitar Hero sessions. I have seen it explicitly banned from conventions because it is so long.

It isn't the longest Guitar Hero song, but it is probably the best known. And by the way, the infamous "Through the Fire and Flames" is 7:22.

Isaac Hayes had a lot of 12-14 minute long epics. The rise and fall of the key change between the 70’s until the end of the 80’s could be blamed for songs being “longer” during that period as well.

Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (1966) was 11+ minutes long.

Dylan had quite a few of those lengthy ones. Visions of Johanna was 7:30. Stuck inside of Mobile was 7:04. Idiot wind was 7:50. Hurricane was 8:35.

I think some classic rock and oldies singles also had extra long versions.

None of those were singles.

Neither was Stairway.

I just looked up, Hurricane was released as a single. The b-side was... More hurricane.

Rapper's Delight was 14 minutes.

Also, (sorry for the tangent) the "intro songs" of tv-series is always wayyy shorter than it used to be.

A) this is a good thing - watching long drawn-out titles is boring. As evidenced by Netflix et al's "skip intro" feature.

B) was likely partly driven by the US need to put advertising in everything. Which meant time for the actual program was constrained by broadcast schedules.

I feel streaming has liberated producers from rigid length constraints, and also liberated consumers from interruptions. Since we skip-titles anyway, keeping them very short actually means I watch them more often.

> A) this is a good thing - watching long drawn-out titles is boring.

Some shows have decent intros that, for the lack of a better word, help set the atmosphere/mood right at the start. You might find it boring, since it is repeated every time, but that is also the reason why shows can put a good amount of production quality and resources into it.

> B) was likely partly driven by the US need to put advertising in everything. Which meant time for the actual program was constrained by broadcast schedules.

Not only the US and it isn't limited to intros. Over the years I ran into a few broadcasts of movies and shows that ruined the plot by cutting too much of the show itself to make space for ads.

They used to spend more money on the intro so they could shorten the actual show. Now I suspect they just run more ads.

There is a great interview out there somewhere about the money they were willing to spend on the Hawaii 5-0 intro/song because it could be used in every show.

Nothing new. Lots of great songs are also very short. Them Bones by Alice in Chains from 1992 is one I can think of off top of my head. It isn't even 2:30 in length.

Another example: In Love by khai dreams. Just over a minute iirc

Clearly hasn’t listened to 7 Minute Freestyle by 21 Savage.

I'm sure they are but something will change and longer songs will get more popular eventually. Trends eventually break.

The LA music machine is the definition of WYSIWIG. Garbage in, garbage out.

Music influences the subconscious, has power to change the psyche.

Future gen is getting weak in terms of long hour doing things which includes procreation to death,my wife is not happy if i make love for 15 minutes, atleast it should be 30 minutes, so I do 31 minutes including the talking thing for 16 minutes.

My times, buckedhead avg stroke was about 10 minutes, on reels they compressed it to 30secs

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