In 1992, November Rain, by Guns N' Roses, reached the top 20 of the Billboard charts. At almost nine minutes long and over a minute instrumental, the ballad was a global hit and reigned on the world charts for over 30 weeks. Now, this couldn't be so. The songs that are most successful are the shortest, so to make November Rain a success today, the band would probably have to delete the introduction, advance the chorus and reduce the song so that it did not exceed 4 minutes under any circumstances. La Vanguardia has analyzed the duration of the greatest hits of the last four decades and has reached a conclusion: the songs are a minute and a half shorter than 30 years ago.
But why are the songs getting shorter and shorter? According to the artists and music producers consulted, this is due to streaming platforms such as Spotify, Tencent or Apple Music, and social networks such as TikTok, the main media that currently disseminate music. Listeners have never had access to so much offer as now, they want to listen to music of all kinds, easily and quickly and, sometimes, they don't wait for the end of the song. Many fans who attend concerts only know the 15 seconds that have become famous on TikTok, an example of how this requirement influences the way music is composed.
Threatened by the “skip to next song” button, artists do everything they can to gain listeners' attention in the first 15 seconds. Fast forwarding choruses and putting drops – the high point of the song – at the beginning and revolutionizing the songs so that they sound accelerated – what is known as speed up – are some of the strategies that artists use to get the audience to listen to the entire song.
Social media usage habits and the dwindling attention span of listeners are transforming the way music sounds and raising an internal debate among artists: Do what you really want to do or adapt to the mainstream – the majority popular taste – to be able to make a living from music?
As can be seen if we take a look at the most listened to singles in recent decades, the songs that are most successful today are a minute and a half shorter than 30 years ago. Billboard's annual rankings show that the average length of the most listened to songs has dropped more than a minute and a half since 1992. The hits of 2022 barely exceed 3 minutes and songs of 5 minutes or more are already residual. Only Taylor Swift manages to place a song longer than 5 minutes in the top 100, with All Too Well (10 Minute Version).
The same trend is observed in the Spanish music market. The data extracted from the book Only Successes 1959-2002 by Fernando Salaverri and from the annual Promusicae lists show the same inclination in the musical tastes of the Spanish population: the songs most listened to by Spaniards during the year 2022 are, on average, a minute shorter than in 1992. In addition, songs of less than 3 minutes also acquire much more presence in the ranking of the last year compared to previous years.
The president of Promusicae, Antonio Guisasola, relates this phenomenon to the entry into play of streaming platforms and social networks. “We are increasingly impatient, and while before we gave songs a chance and listened to them in their entirety, now it is very easy for us to hit the 'go to the next song' button when we don't like something in the first 15 seconds.”
When Spotify's algorithms detect that users are skipping a song too many times – a mechanism known as skip rate – it is no longer included in the important playlists and in the weekly discovery lists personalized for users, which are key in the generation of musical tastes.
“Artists are threatened by this skip rate,” says Guisasola. According to the president of Promusicae, this means that artists have to figure out how to attract listeners in the first seconds of the song. “The first 15 or 20 seconds of the songs are key, so the artists quickly move on to a chorus because if not, the songs are buried by the algorithm.” This causes many artists to make artistic decisions based on what the music industry asks now: short songs that don't take too long to reach the drop or chorus.
“Many times the automatic response is to see it as something negative, but I think it is not,” says Jimena Tomás, digital content coordinator at Sony Music, pointing out that more and more artists are releasing songs that are less than 3 minutes long. “Short songs are not worse because quality is not linked to duration; The market, technology and songs change, but this is neither better nor worse, it is just proof that songs respond to the environment in which they are born.”
“With an increasingly extensive range of music, as a listener you have more songs to choose from, so you give each one fewer opportunities,” explains Tomás. This is linked to how streaming platforms like Spotify work, “previously it was unthinkable to buy 1,000 CDs every month, but streaming allows you to access a global musical repertoire in just one click, without paying more to listen to more music,” he clarifies.
“Now we don't pay so much attention to the songs we listen to,” says Cristina Len, emerging artist and composer. “We are constantly with headphones listening to our playlists on the subway, in the car… Before it wasn't done like that, but we listened to music in a moment of silence at home in which you put on the CD and stopped to really listen to the song” .
In this artist's opinion, today the supply of music exceeds the demand. Like other products, songs have to compete for listeners' attention; She has to become attractive so that they choose her before another of the immense offer. “For this reason, a lot of music is created for easy consumption or fast digesting,” she explains.
“We are in a moment of hypercapitalization,” explains Len. “At the end of the day, music is framed within an industry that follows capitalist logic and the reality is that either you adapt or you are excluded,” says the artist, “but I don't want to depend on having three jobs to be able to live, so if I have to adapt to the mainstream, I'm going to do it."
“It's complicated, because sometimes I feel like you either have to get away from your personality and make mainstream music or you really have to look for another job,” laments Len. For the artist, one way to coexist with this current panorama of the music industry is to adopt a part of the mainstream and make it her own; adapt it to her own style and essence. “For me this is key, because when that expression does not come from you, but from knowing what is required now to do something similar, it becomes imposed and loses its meaning.”
Barcelona artist Julieta Gracián acknowledges that the skip rate has influenced her way of producing music: “Sometimes I have moved choruses because they arrived too late.” On her latest album, 5AM, only two of the 10 songs on it are longer than 3 minutes. “It's how my brain works now; mine and that of many people,” she reflects, “we want things now, and if a song is too long, we disconnect.”
The short songs are associated with another phenomenon: the disappearance of the album. “Every time we work more on releasing singles than albums,” says Julieta. An album entails greater elaboration, since the songs that make it up participate in the same narrative, “but I get the feeling that not everyone stops to listen to an album and think about its meaning,” the singer acknowledges. “Now people think harder,” she observes, “they want a hit and that's it.”
Cristina Len, who has also observed this trend, adds that in the era of rating artists based on the number of views, not all of them take the time to produce albums. “Currently the music industry is bursting with productive artists who release one song a month, because that is the intake that demand demands now,” she says.
TikTok is changing the rules of the music industry, and both artists and record labels are taking advantage of the pull of this social network to promote songs. 55% of the songs on the Hot 100 of 2022 were viral on this social network (considering viral an audio that has been used more than 500 thousand times to create new content). Some even exceed 10 million videos, and each one of them accumulates its own views, so it is difficult to imagine the number of times those songs have been played in total.
Julieta is an artist with a lot of presence on social networks. She uses TikTok to connect more with the public and advertise her songs and assures that having a presence on this social network has made her known to many people. “With a single TikTok you can easily reach 17,000 or 20,000 people,” she says. Many of her songs have gone viral on the platform, and people have begun to incorporate some fragments into her own videos. “It's like a chain,” he explains, “one person makes a TikTok with the song, then another person sees it and makes another TikTok... And, in the end, this makes the song expand and reach many more people.”
But “many people don't even know the entire song, they only know the part that has gone viral on TikTok,” says Cristina Len. “We have reached a point where TikTok is no longer a platform where you can discover music, but it is the music itself,” reflects the artist. Guisasola, who agrees with the artist, points out that "especially the younger audience, is content with listening to a part of the song." "I notice it a lot with Enamorada de tu," Julieta acknowledges, "people sing at the top of their lungs." , especially the part that he had posted on TikTok.”
