Music is Getting Shorter
(and Drake is taking over the world)
Like Rob Gordon, I think that if we can understand popular music, the soundtrack of our lives, then maybe we can understand ourselves a little better.
With that goal, I’ve done an even longer analysis¹ of Billboards Hot-100 data, Spotify track info, and song lyrics to figure out what trends we can observe in music over the last two decades. The results are fascinating and point to some big changes.
Attention Spans are Shortening
In the age of Instagram and instant gratification on the internet, it’s not surprising that we have less patience than we used to. What is surprising is that this trend has been going on for over 18 years.
Using Spotify data to determine the length of a song and then weighing that data by how many weeks it spends on the Hot-100, we can see that the average duration of a track has been steadily decreasing each year.
From well over 4 minutes to now around 3 and a half, the average hit song is getting markedly shorter.
