4 ms·

... why not? It's occupying 50% more listening time, isn't it?

crazygringo 3y ago
I definitely wouldn't want the economic incentive to be for artists to make all their songs 10-20 minutes long... But more importantly, for popular music, song length doesn't correlate to work or effort, generally speaking. A 6 minute song doesn't take 50% more effort than a 4 minute one. (Other genres like classical are different though -- a 25-minute long symphonic movement obviously takes ~5x as much work to both write and record than a 5-minute one.)
- naniwaduni 3y ago
  It does not seem especially obvious that the price of a product should depend on the cost of its input and not on the value of its output? We can quibble about whether "time that a user spends listening" is correctly what a streaming service wants to buy from an artist, but it doesn't seem like the reasonable metric.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > I definitely wouldn't want the economic incentive to be for artists to make all their songs 10-20 minutes long... Pink Floyd just read your comment and it looks like they’re headed back to the studio! Fingers crossed…
- jrflowers 3y ago
  > Other genres like classical are different though -- a 25-minute long symphonic movement obviously takes ~5x as much work to both write and record than a 5-minute one. This makes sense. Every time I listen to 4’33” I am moved to tears and the thought of losing even a few seconds of that composition is abhorrent.
- jstanley 3y ago
  But a song that is listened to a million times didn't necessarily take more effort than one that is only listened to once. The goal was never to pay commensurate to the effort that was put in.
- kouru225 3y ago
  The economic incentive should be for you to create as much good content as possible. If you have a continuous relationship between time listened and money generated, then it doesn’t matter if you have one 40 minute song or 15 songs totaling 40 minutes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

I definitely wouldn't want the economic incentive to be for artists to make all their songs 10-20 minutes long... But more importantly, for popular music, song length doesn't correlate to work or effort, generally speaking. A 6 minute song doesn't take 50% more effort than a 4 minute one. (Other genres like classical are different though -- a 25-minute long symphonic movement obviously takes ~5x as much work to both write and record than a 5-minute one.)

naniwaduni 3y ago
It does not seem especially obvious that the price of a product should depend on the cost of its input and not on the value of its output? We can quibble about whether "time that a user spends listening" is correctly what a streaming service wants to buy from an artist, but it doesn't seem like the reasonable metric.
ryandrake 3y ago
> I definitely wouldn't want the economic incentive to be for artists to make all their songs 10-20 minutes long... Pink Floyd just read your comment and it looks like they’re headed back to the studio! Fingers crossed…
jrflowers 3y ago
> Other genres like classical are different though -- a 25-minute long symphonic movement obviously takes ~5x as much work to both write and record than a 5-minute one. This makes sense. Every time I listen to 4’33” I am moved to tears and the thought of losing even a few seconds of that composition is abhorrent.
jstanley 3y ago
But a song that is listened to a million times didn't necessarily take more effort than one that is only listened to once. The goal was never to pay commensurate to the effort that was put in.
kouru225 3y ago
The economic incentive should be for you to create as much good content as possible. If you have a continuous relationship between time listened and money generated, then it doesn’t matter if you have one 40 minute song or 15 songs totaling 40 minutes.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]