Are Hip Hop Albums Getting Shorter?

What do Kanye West, Pusha T, Kid Cudi, and Nas have in common — besides being amazing artists who have their fingers on the pulse of popular culture?

They all released albums this month with exactly 7 songs on them. 7 songs. That’s the length of an old school EP. I know that Kanye had a hand in all of these records, but still, it begs the question, is this a coincidence?

‘Ye’, ‘Kids See Ghosts’, ‘Daytona’, and ‘Nasir’ all contain no filler whatsoever. No joke tracks. No weird skits. No recordings of secret converstions or answering machine messages with their own associated track number. In the age of Spotify, people just skip past those anyways. Maybe we have finally moved beyond the idea of filling up a CD to get your money’s worth.

To prove to myself that the trend of shorter albums was real, I decided to grab all of the albums that had tracks on the Billboard Hot 100 from 2000–2018. Then I used Spotify’s developer API to find out how many tracks were on each of those albums. After removing singles and compilation records, I could see whether the number of songs per album is in fact going down.

Album Length for all Genres

First, let’s take a look at the number of songs per album, averaged over the years from 2000 to 2018