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Economics of Spotify is making songs shorter
- perfmode 8y agoEarl Sweatshirt’s new LP clocks in at 25 minutes; 15 songs.
- marcelr 8y agoHe’s always had short albums
- briandear 8y agoEconomics of radio made songs shorter too. Listen to Sun Records tracks and there are plenty of 3 minute songs. I know a few recording artists with several million streams and “radio edits” have been a thing for a long time and not a single one mentions Spotify economics as a motivator for particular edits. I am not sure that recording artists are actually doing Spotify math when it comes to their mixes — they’re often just using the same “radio math” they’ve always done. Pop songs have always been radio friendly. The only artists that can get away with a Stairway to Heaven length song are Led Zepplin-level acts, and even then it has to be an extraordinarily massive tune to get a 5 minute+ song on the radio.
- briandear 8y ago> DAMN. won the Pulitzer Prize for music, going to show that this trend isn’t necessarily lowering the quality of music. A bit of a fallacy. Awards aren’t judged against music ever recorded, but against peers released in the same year. Quality could very well be going down or going up, but that would be a trend that can’t be measured across a single award season.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago33 rpm and 78 rpm singles had much firmer time limits, and much wider impact on song length. Yet my preferred song "service" is BGM on youtube - 10 hours of someone playing jazz. I think we shall see multiple markets developing as song type, duration and other variables are played with.
- kbutler 8y agoIt 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 To be fair, the article acknowledges songs were already getting shorter in the 90s, after getting longer with LPs and CDs.
- p1necone 8y agoHonestly I'm not bothered, the kind of artist that would care enough about optimizing profit on Spotify to actually change their music isn't the kind of artist I give a shit about in the first place.
- dagurp 8y agoMaybe there's pressure from the publisher. Many artists have terrible contracts
- jere 8y agoI find it hard to believe Kendrick Lamar falls in that bucket and with that, I can't take this article very seriously.
- p1necone 8y agoYeah I'd be much more inclined to believe it's just a desired stylistic change from him. Or perhaps he knows about shorter songs being more profitable and decided to do it without sacrificing integrity. (Constraints do make creativity more fun/easier sometimes).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- plaguuuuuu 8y agoThe cognitive dissonance is real
- claudiawerner 8y agoMany artists were told to shorten their songs or at least produce radio versions, and that was part of the contract. At least according to the film Bohemian Raphsody, Queen was faced with such a predicament - now imagine if they had been weaker willed (though still the kind of artist you might give a shit about)... Money (and security required for the lack of it) is unfortunately a big incentive in society's producton of art, and one look at the "culture industry" tells you more than you need to know.
- alkonaut 8y agoLong popular songs often had (and have) “radio edits”. This is just that again, isn’t it?
- jere 8y agoOne infuriating thing about economic incentives and Spotify: Very often, when a song comes up, I will want to delete it from my current playlist because it no longer interests me. In many years it has been practically impossible in the UI. The only way to do it is to hunt through thousands of songs, then click on a context menu to delete it, despite this being something that would be incredibly easy to add to the current song interface and accomplish in one second (Adding the same song to a playlist is an option there). So why is this the case? I recently realized that preventing me from cleaning up my playlist means MORE SKIPS for Spotify. They can shove more ads in my face by forcing me to listen to more stuff I don't care about over time. It sounds silly but I would bet money that this is the reason considering how technically simple this feature is and how large the value would be.
- JimmyAustin 8y agoI'm not sure about the mobile app, but command-f to search for songs inside a playlist works on the desktop app. It's really not hard to delete songs.
- andrewflnr 8y agoOn mobile, searching inside playlists recently turned into an option in the three-dot menu on the display page. I miss the old interface where you just drag down to expose a search field, focus it and start typing. :(
- collinf 8y agoI still have that on iOS? Never noticed it going away and it’s still there for me. That feature really did take way too long for me to realize although.
- andrewflnr 8y agoI really should have said Android. I guess I just assumed they used a cross-platform framework on mobile, with no justification at all. Oops.
- bitcurious 8y agoIt 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 in "The Entertainer" referencing the radio cut of "Piano Man."
- djs070 8y agoThe tiny data points presented in the article do not justify the strongly worded title
- montalbano 8y agoInteresting hypothesis but it would certainly be strengthened by some input from musicians targeting spotify listeners. Who is to say shorter attention spans aren't part of the cause? Another important missing bit of information - what percentage of the song needs to be listened to for it to count as a full play? Is it 100%? That seems to be what is implied by the article.
- drcode 8y agoI think it's more likely that the decrease in song length is due to the fact that "music production" is becoming a highly specialized and advanced field of work- In the old days, artists just created songs with off-the-cuff lengths... nowadays, a team of experts are going to mull over every single measure in a mainstream music track and ask the question: "Is this measure providing enough value to deserve a spot in this track? If not, these engineers will "refactor" the song to remove bits that might bore a listener and cause them to play another track... the fact that spotify now exists is just incidental to this separate, orthogonal trend in music production. It's crazy how technical and deep the music production space is becoming.
- woodandsteel 8y agoThis is one reason I get my music from youtube, not spotify. The videos just as long as the musicians want them to be. For instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzjvL6bRRKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzjvL6bRRKg
- y7 8y agoMisleading title. The article doesn't substantiate the claim and just points out a coincidence. It even says so: > Still, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how much streaming has contributed to the recent shortening of songs. The length of pop songs had already been falling through the 1990s, before accelerating in recent years. Some music industry observers blame shortening attention spans—but there isn’t much rigorous evidence that our ability to focus has changed (paywall). Others believe that shorter songs may be a result of more consumer choice—songs need to be more compact and catchy to stand out in the crowd. Interesting that the last part of the url is "is-spotify-making-songs-shorter". Maybe that was the original title and the editor wanted more clickbait?
- pcstl 8y agoNothing new, really. Do people generally believe most mainstream songs being around 3 minutes in length is due to artistic choice?