A frame from the Queen clip “Bohemian Rhapsody”. The duration of the composition is 6 minutes.
Do you remember the long, dramatically extended encounters in the pop ballads of the 80s? According to a new study, all compositions with long introductions do not occupy the top positions of the music charts, and this may be the guilt of the listeners’ short attention.
The entry, which in the mid-1980s averaged more than 20 seconds, today does not last Longer than 5 seconds, the study notes. Depending on what the user’s music world is, he can scold or thank streaming services for departing from the instrumental intro, says Hubert Léveillé Gauvin, a doctoral student in music theory at Ohio State University.
Leville Gauvin calls the “attention economics” of modern pop music the cause of these changes. This means that the songwriters intentionally speed up the musical intro in order to capture the attention of unstable listeners, many of whom use Spotify, Pandora and other streaming services.
We know that voice is one of the most eye-catching things, Which are in the musical composition. Therefore, often many people who want to concentrate prefer instrumental music.
“This is necessary for survival: songs that manage to capture and retain the attention of listeners are lost, and others are skipped. There’s always the next song, and if people can easily skip songs, you have to do something to attract the attention of users, “says Leville Gauvin.
He noticed that instead of looking for a straight Income from streaming services, artists are looking for something different to attract listeners to concerts or other products that they sell.
Artists and producers cease to make cultural products. Instead, they make “advertisements” for their own promotion. The product is not necessarily a song, it can be a personal brand.
Leville Gauvin measured the tempo of 303 singles that were in the top 10 in 29 years and found a clear tendency to accelerate pop music: the average rate increased by about 8%. He compared the number of words in the names of the songs and found an ever-increasing decrease in the words in them after a few years. The researcher considers the disappearance of the intro to be truly astonishing: the time before words was reduced by 78%.
To illustrate the difference, Leville Goven suggests comparing the song “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”, performed by Starship, with the popular song Maroon 5 “Sugar”.
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At Starship the transition to the first word of the song takes about 22 seconds. The composition plays at an average pace, and the listener will get to know about one minute of the track before he learns that “the star ship will not be stopped”, that is, he will hear the name. Maroon 5, on the other hand, gets to the song’s name in the lyrics in a striking tempo – in just 40 seconds. The entry is twice shorter than the Starship. However, there are exceptions to this trend.
Gotye’s popular song “Somebody That I Used To Know”, hit in 2012, was called almost three times longer than that of other charts of the same year. The 20-second instrumental introduction was four times longer than the average, and the listener waits two full minutes before he hears the title in the song.
In his second study, Leville Gauvin appreciated the data provided by Spotify to see how popular the artist’s songs are, whose compositions are more suited to attract attention, compared to the less popular songs released by this artist. In this work, he did not find a confirmation of the “attention economics” hypothesis.
Music constantly evolves under the influence of many factors, and there is no way to explain all the changes that the researcher discovered while studying streaming services. But he is sure that they certainly contribute.
If you look into the past, technological changes, most likely, influenced how people composed and listened to music. Leville Gauvin adds that the CD jumped and overtook vinyl records and cassettes.
The average length of songs for many decades remained unchanged – about three minutes. Why so much, science is not known. Some experts suggest that the reason is of a technological nature – the first phonographs lost 10-inch discs, which could accommodate about three minutes of music. The increase in the average length of tracks began after 1959, and this figure grew until 1992, which can be explained by the improvement of vinyl disc production technology and the creation of CDs. However, the question of why the duration of the compositions began to decline steadily after the 1990s has still remained open.
