If you’re a music fan, you’ve probably realized that song length is trending downward. Songs with a duration of under three minutes can be found in almost any album released in 2018, and statistics from Billboard Charts confirm this trend: the average song length of songs on the Hot 100 in 2018 was 3 minutes and 30 seconds long, dropping from 3 minutes and 50 seconds just five years prior. Additionally, the number of songs on the chart that pushed the boundaries of brevity, each with a duration of less than 2 minutes and 30 seconds, increased from 1% in 2015 to 6% last year.
First, is this a bad thing? Not necessarily; several of the most critically acclaimed albums, and some of my personal favorites from 2018, undoubtedly followed suit with the above trend, but did not sacrifice artistry or quality in doing so. For example, Noname’s Room 25 had an average song length of 3 minutes and 5 seconds, and its first two songs, the jazz-infused “Self” and “Blaxploitation,” which together totaled under four minutes, were acclaimed by critics as a stunning opening one-two punch to the record. Another of my favorites from last year, Mitski’s Be The Cowboy, landed at #1 on nine critics’ year-end best album lists, but had an average song duration of a staggeringly short 2 minutes and 17 seconds, successfully featuring several vignettes that flash before the listener before they disappear into the next song. So, shortness of song does not automatically correspond to a loss of development and quality (well, except for Kanye and Lil Pump’s “I Love It”); in Mitski’s case, it has allowed for an interesting concept to come alive.
In many ways, the tendency of songs to be shorter has developed as artists find new ways to engage their audience and interact with the technology of the time. The most prominent example of this was Tierra Whack’s Whack World, an album from last year that spanned just 15 songs, each precisely one minute in length. This album was playful, funny, sometimes startlingly good, and was, very much intentionally, perfectly compatible with Instagram’s 60-second video limit, allowing Whack to brilliantly release songs on Instagram with their corresponding videos (seriously, look her up on Instagram and scroll down to the album – it’s one of the coolest uses of social media I’ve seen). As ever, the most successful artists show the ability to adapt to the changing landscape of music consumption, and the shortening of songs may be an attempt to grab consumers in an unprecedented way.
Another commonly-cited reason for this trend is Spotify’s payout method, which compensates artists per stream of their song. That is, one stream of a ten-minute song awards an artist the same amount of money as a stream of a two-minute-long competitor. So, an artist will be rewarded much more over time for releasing an album containing 20 three-minute songs instead of an album with 15 four-minute songs. As Spotify has grown in ubiquity, the impact of this advantage for short tracks has been felt over multiple major artists’ albums from various genres; Drake’s tracks on Scorpion (2018) were 11% shorter than on Views (2016), Kanye West’s tracks were 39% shorter on The Life of Pablo (2016) than on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010), and Eric Church’s tracks were 21% shorter on Desperate Man (2018) than on The Outsiders (2014). Again, whether these artists’ works have changed in quality is anyone’s opinion, but it will be interesting to see to what extent artists go in the future to take advantage of this lucrative opportunity.
Finally, I’d like to finish this column by recommending some of my favorite songs from either end of the spectrum of song duration, to illustrate how different artists have benefitted by either keeping songs brief or extending the duration into the double digits of minutes. Here are my recommendations:
My Favorite Long (9+ minutes) Songs:
Lana Del Rey, “Venice Bitch”
Sufjan Stevens, “Impossible Soul”
Susanne Sundfør, “Memorial”
Short (<2:30) Songs:
Mitski, “Geyser”
Rosalia, “De Aquí No Sales – Cap.4: Disputa”
Tierra Whack, “Flea Market”
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