The boom of music streaming services was associated with the shortening and acceleration of tracks

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 listened to and analyzed songs for the first ten of the charts from 1986 to 2015 for several months and discovered a sharp rejection of long introductions. He also recorded a noticeable increase in tempo and drew attention to the fact that the performers of the newest successful songs quickly get to the name of the hit in the text. In addition, the names of the songs are shorter today than before – often this is just one word.

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”.