Thanks To Social Media, Pop Music Is Shrinking

When was the last time you heard a song through to the end? Not just played it, but really listened without skipping, without checking your phone, without letting your attention dissolve like sugar in tea?

Perhaps it was in a car, years ago. Or through cheap headphones on a train, watching the world tilt past your window. Once upon a time, songs were built like small cities with winding alleys, distant echoes, a rhythm that slowly revealed itself.

IMDb

Now, they are more like pop-up stalls. Bright. Disposable. And always ready to be packed up and replaced by the next.

In the current attention economy, with TikTok and Instagram reels , dances performed like incantations, faces rehearsing joy in front of bathroom mirrors, pop songs have shrunk.

According to a recent research, the average length of a song in the UK has fallen from just over four minutes in 2019 to around three minutes and twelve seconds today in the UK. Some are shorter still flickering in and out of our lives in under two minutes, like a text message you never meant to send.

What we are hearing is not music as it once was — a form of storytelling, of longing, of protest, of pleasure — but music as content. Music as bait. Music as backdrop to the real event: your attention sliced into slivers.

In early 2022, a music artist, Lil Yachty uploaded a scratchy, 83-second track called Poland to SoundCloud that went on to be a hit No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100. No verse, no arc it was just a looping yelp of “I took the Wooooooock to Polaaaand,” over a warbling synth line. A publishing executive called it “an idea, almost a tweet.” And maybe that’s the truest thing one can say about pop music today: it's no longer a body of work. It’s a post.

A 2018 study by engineer Michael Tauberg according to the Billboard found that since 2000, songs on the Billnoard Hot 100 have lost roughly 40 seconds in length, from 4 minutes and 10 seconds to around 3:30. By 2021, the top 50 tracks averaged just 3:07.

And beneath that average lies a growing minority of songs even shorter, sometimes barely long enough to cross the threshold for streaming royalties. In 2016, just 4 per cent of Top 10 songs were under three minutes. By 2022, that number was 38 per cent.

The short song, once an artistic choice, is now economic strategy. A song that ends quickly is more likely to be replayed. More plays, more pennies. A song that starts immediately — hook-first — reduces the chance of being skipped. Skip rates kill songs. The algorithm keeps score. In this light, the song is no longer a story. It is a fragment, a pitch, a lure. It is content and it must not outstay its welcome.

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The Era of the Scroll

TikTok, the social platform masquerading as a music discovery service is now one of the most powerful forces in pop music. On TikTok, music is often consumed in 15-second loops: one line, one beat, one gesture repeated until it becomes less of a song and more of a scent. Artists, producers, and labels know this. Many now begin a track with the “moment” they hope will go viral. No more pre-chorus. No more third verse. Just the candy, without the meal.

In the past, radio shaped song length. In the 1960s, The Chiffons’ He’s So Fine (1:52) and The Beatles’ Love Me Do (2:22) were short not because attention spans were short, but because AM radio had rules, and vinyl had limits. Now, platforms like Spotify count a stream after 30 seconds. So why write a four-minute song when a two-minute one can be played twice?

There is money in brevity. There is power in the skip.

Musicians like Lil Nas X and Pink Pantheress are creating compressed songs that rap up in 2 mins or less. So, is this something totally new in the industry?

Of course, short songs are not new. And not all are bad. In 2017, XXXTentacion’s 17 packed 11 songs into just 21 minutes and still managed to sound like it came from the heart. In 2018, Sicko Mode by Travis Scott mashed three songs into one, each about 90 seconds long. And long before that, punk made brevity into an act of defiance.

So why are we debating it, then? The difference now is the intent. The song is not short because the artist demands it but because the system does. We are no longer shaping the platforms. They are shaping us and the kind of music we enjoy.