Introducing Switched on Pop

Check out Switched on Pop, a podcast that digs into the musical theory and cultural context of pop music. In this episode, hosts Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan explore how streaming changed the sound of pop music. For more from Switched on Pop, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, it's Nate from the Vergecast. We have a great interview coming up tomorrow on the interview episode. It's between Casey Newton and Alex Samos, who is the former head of security at Facebook. They tape that at South by Southwest in front of a live audience. That's coming tomorrow. We've got a regular Vergecast later in the week, but today, we're going to mix it up. We're going to try something a little bit new. There's a new podcast in the Vox Media podcast family. It's called Switched on Pop. It's a podcast that digs into music theory and cultural context of pop music. I actually met Charlie, one of the hosts at South by. He's a super interesting guy. He used to be a Google engineer, was laying fiber in Africa, and now he makes this podcast about music. And he was telling me about this episode, and I thought Vergecast listeners would really like it. It's all about how the streaming platforms and how they work have changed the way music sounds and like literally how long songs are.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  So because of the way streaming platforms like Spotify pay people, songs are getting shorter and albums have more tracks on them. It's totally wild. Charlie and his co-host Nate explain it all. I think you're going to really like it. I think you should subscribe to Switched on Pop, so check it out.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  So Nate, have you noticed this anxiety that has overtaken pop music in the last six months?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Which one? I feel like pop is full of anxiety.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  So according to many, the economics of streaming is changing music so significantly right now that pop may literally never sound the same again. And today, I want to investigate these claims by seeing how musicians are altering their sounds to make it in today's streaming economy. And to do this, I've recruited Aisha Hassan and Dan Kopf, who have written about how streaming is affecting the sound of pop for courts in a piece called "The Reason Why Your Favorite Pop Songs Are Getting Shorter." Aisha and Dan, welcome to the show.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Thanks for having us.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks. Nice to be here.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  This is exciting.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  So in a recent Guardian interview, mega pop producer Mark Ronson said that "all your songs have to be under 3 minutes and 15 seconds because if people don't listen to them all the way to the end, they get into this ratio of non-complete heard, which sends your Spotify rating down and songwriters are forced to churn out hits at short order." So Aisha, can you untangle Ronson's gripe and explain what is causing so much concern?

• 2:24Speaker 02

  So the way that many music streaming services work is that songs generate money per play. That means every time that they're streamed, they generate a certain amount of money, and that's very little. So it ranges between $0.004 to $0.008. And then if you don't play it to the very end and that rating goes down, meaning that people don't listen to the song through as much, then the song is less likely to make it into Spotify's really lucrative playlists, which get them streamed more. And because the amount of money is so little, volume is really important.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  So this is obviously extremely different from how artists were paid in the past.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Right. I think it's important to note that artists right now, according to a report in 2017, they're only getting about 10% of the music industry's total revenue. But streaming is so important because that's how they're going to break out, right? And if they're not going to be heard by audiences, then less people are going to buy their tickets for their concerts, less people are going to buy their merch. So to be visible, it's really important to sometimes game the streaming system so more people listen to their stuff.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Okay, gaming the streaming system. Yeah, so there's some sort of perverse incentives going on here. And just to sort of get a sort of order of magnitude around this, a CD used to cost $15 to $20. And how many songs do you have to stream in order to make the equivalent on an old record?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  So 1,000 streams is equivalent of $6. So we're talking about 1,500 streams to get $9.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Well, and of course, and the artist probably is only making a fraction of that those nine dollars.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. The music services tend to take thirty percent of that revenue. So Spotify or Apple Music or whatever will take around thirty percent. And then even though you've got the rest of that money going to artists, depending on the deal that they have with record labels and the amount of people who have contributed to the track, that money, which is already very little at the beginning, is split up even more. So artists are actually getting a very, very small amount of money.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is interesting. I feel like we have two different issues at hand now that we have to deal with. One, as you mentioned, is this question of are songs getting shorter? And sort of why? And then also, are there certain like time markers or boundaries that you have to fit within? Is that changing the way that perhaps people are writing music? And so let's take them in that order.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Great.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  So are songs, are songs getting shorter?

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Yes, definitely. So around 2000, the median length of a Billboard Hot 100 songs was well over four minutes, so about four minutes and seven seconds. And in 2018, it was just over three and a half minutes. So we've lopped off more than thirty seconds off the average Billboard Hot 100 songs. So that's, that's quite a bit.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Fascinating. So Mark Ronson's anxiety that Charlie quoted at the beginning of this episode is perhaps warranted. Songs are getting shorter.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Yes, and there's also these extreme examples. So there are a bunch of songs now that are under two and a half minutes long. So in the 2000s, there were virtually no songs under two and a half minutes that made the charts. And in 2018, about six percent of them were less than two and a half minutes and some even just two minutes.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you documented this in your piece and there's like a hockey stick like graph. Basically, starting in, I don't know, like 20-

• 5:57Speaker 02

  2015.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  In 2015, all of a sudden, there's all of these songs that are now two and a half minutes or shorter. You pointed to Kanye West and Lil Pump's "I Love It", which comes in at just over two minutes.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  So the question, of course, is like, where is the music going? I'm curious, in your investigations, how much of this do you see as intertwined with the dominance of hip hop as the main form of today's popular music?

• 6:26Speaker 03

  So that's a complicated thing to answer because hip hop has seeped into all genres. So even when you listen to country, as you guys have pointed out in previous shows, country now has a hip hop effect. But if you look at every genre, they've all fallen. R and B, rock, pop, country, all of them have taken a big dive over the last two decades. Rap the most, so it's definitely the biggest phenomenon there. But it's not just a hip hop thing.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  So on the one hand, we have some different incentive structures set up. And just to be clear about them, my understanding is we have songs are getting shorter because the way that you get paid with streaming is per song. And it used to be, since the, I don't know, the age of album oriented music, that the album was the main way that you made your money. And so now, if you're getting paid per song, it makes sense to have like 20 really short songs that might actually run shorter than an album length that would be 10 songs that are twice, three times as long. And so you're gaming, can I get as many songs in as possible? Is that an accurate description of how some people are understanding this?

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. I just want to complicate things a little bit. So yes, we are pretty confident that streaming matters. But this is actually a pretty long-term trend. So if we look over the 20th century, you'll see that songs were quite short in the 40s and 50s. And then they got way longer through the latter half of the 20th century. And then, starting around the late 1990s, all the way up to today, we see songs shortening. So it's definitely got to be more than just streaming. But we're confident that sort of the effect that we're seeing over the last several years is a result of the desire to make more money from having shorter songs. And if somebody listens to an album repetitively, the artist will get more money. But there's definitely more going on there than just streaming.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Okay. So Spotify actually put out a press release about this phenomenon and said that, "In the world of digital consumption, our narrow windows of free time are the object of fierce competition by the seemingly limitless choices streaming platforms..." Short songs represent a solution to an audience's abundance of choice alongside endless opportunities for diversion. So there's sort of like a question of like, are audiences also driving this? That perhaps that's, that's what they're suggesting. I think what we need to do, though, is examine the music and see, is this really going on? And I'm particularly interested in looking at like, if songs are getting shorter, what's being put on the chopping block? And so we had to sort of, we established that hip hop is the most dominant form of pop music right now.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  You go on the billboard, 60, 70% of the charts are going to be hip hop. And if you also look at the songs which tend to be shorter, especially these sort of two-minute, two and a half minute songs, a lot of hip hop songs in there as well. And I think there's a, there's a part of this which makes sense because in hip hop, you don't necessarily have as rigid a, a structure of a pop song. You don't necessarily have to have, for example, a pre-chorus, or a post-chorus, or a bridge. You can just have hook, verse, hook, verse, and you're out. And so when you look at a song like Kanye West and Lil Pump's piece, they're doing exactly that.

• 9:41Speaker 05

  When the first time they ask you, you want sparkling or still? Are you trying to act like you was drinking sparkling water before you came out here? You're such a [__], I'm a sick folk, I like a quick folk. I'm a sick folk, I like a-

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Let's do a two-verse piece instead of, you know, you go back to 90s hip hop, you might've had three, four, five verses in a song. So it's easy to just, you can chop it down, make more songs. That makes sense to me. I think where things get more complicated are when songs are using sort of more traditional verse-chorus-song form. So if we look at a song like "East Side," that song comes in at 2 minutes and 54 seconds, which is a pretty short pop song. And I wanted to look at just, where is the extra music going? So let's take a listen to Benny Blanco's "East Side," and we're going to listen to just what happens at the end. Cool.

• 10:30Speaker 06

  She used to meet me on the east side.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Okay, what did we just hear?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  That I don't know.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  An outro?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Outro.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  An outro. Yes, I got it, I got it.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  It's an outro. But here's the thing. The material that was leading before that outro was the bridge of the song. And there's like, a pretty hard and fast rule. Nate, Professor, what happens after a bridge?

• 10:56Speaker 04

  You go back to the chorus.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  You go back to the chorus. And so what they've actually done is they've just lopped off the final chorus, instead replaced it with an outro, which is the same material as the chorus, but you don't have that sort of big, final bombastic moment. Instead, it's this sort of fading out moment. It's maybe appropriate for the song, since this is a melancholy, looking back on a relationship song. But I think we're missing the final 30 seconds of the song, because they literally just don't have the final two choruses.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like a bridge that just like, goes directly into the ocean.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  It's a bridge to nowhere.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  So that's one sort of victim of the, perhaps, streaming-driven shortening of pop songs, that they're getting a chorus that you might expect to hear at the end is getting chopped off.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  And replaced by just a little outro.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so I found some other things that I think are ways that artists are adapting to make things a little thinner, a little trim. I was talking to Jeremy Lloyd of Marion Hill, who was on our show a few episodes back, and really thoughtful about composition. And one of the things he said to us was, the biggest thing I've been thinking about is skip rates, to try to get people through the whole song. You all established that if you don't listen to 30 seconds of a song, people, it doesn't count, right?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  People, if they're skipping around, it's not counting. And so, how can artists game a way to hook you into the song immediately? Well, probably the most obvious thing is, don't have a minute-long intro. And so, one sort of adaptation that I've seen is a, just jump right in on the song. Almost like, starting the song in the middle. And so, here's a clip of Kodak Black's "Calling My Spirit", and just check it out, it might actually make you jump.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  I just want to be clear, this was not me cutting into the song. The song literally just starts right here.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  It's how I really dropped in media whereas I'm just in the middle of everything going on.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Don't you feel like you've stepped in on someone's conversation? You're like, "I'm so sorry."

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  I kind of loved it, though. I was bouncing right from the moment it started.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Ditto, ditto, it's very effective. That is the point. And the other adaptation that I've seen songwriters make is an old adage summarized by Dave Grohl so beautifully, talking with Kyle Grass from Tenacious D.

• 13:31Speaker 07

  You know who writes the hits? Aerosmith writes the hits. The song is all chorus. "Love in an Elevator"? What's the verse to that song? Damn it, it's "Love in an Elevator." "Janey's Got a Gun"? It's all it. Well, how's it start? "Janey's got a gun." Right, so it's chorus, chorus, pre-chorus, chorus, verse, kind of. Chorus, pre-chorus, chorus, chorus, chorus finale, chorus. It's all chorus. Don't bore us, get to the chorus. Don't bore us, get to the chorus. Hit lessons.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Wow, Dave Grohl, musicologist. I like it. So I have observed that many people are taking Dave Grohl's advice. "Don't bore us, get to the chorus." And rather than having a traditional intro into a verse, into a pre-chorus, into chorus, we're just starting right in the chorus. The king of this method is Post Malone. You could look at his songs Better Now, Rockstar, Psycho, Congratulations. They all do this. Let's just take a listen to Better Now, for instance.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  That is the chorus. And it works. It hooks you right in immediately. Yeah.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you're waiting for the next time it comes around, so you're more likely to stay now that you've got the best bit of the song, almost.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. And you're like, "Can I get that one again? I'm gonna keep listening, get through that 30-second mark."

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Can I ask you a question, Charlie? Why didn't they always do this, if it's so effective?

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Because maybe a pop song wants to have some romance and it wants to slowly seduce you and eventually lead you to that wonderful moment in the chorus. But now people are like, I want that dopamine hit right away. There's so many alternatives at all times, according to Spotify, right? So I'm witnessing these adaptations all over the billboard. But the one that interests me the most is something that actually hearkens to the past. And in order to uncover the most creative adaptive strategy for making music in the streaming era, I'm gonna have to pass to Dr. Nate Sloan to take us back into the classical past.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  That's my cue. So we're gonna talk about something we're calling the pop overture. And that, the second half of that phrase, the overture, is like the classical part of this conversation because overtures go back to the world of opera. If you think of like, you know, a Rossini opera like William Tell, you know, that starts with just an instrumental overture, including the famous theme.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  But those, but those overtures are not exactly what we're talking about because those overtures don't really feature like music from the opera that you're gonna see.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  What's the point of them? What are they doing?

• 16:36Speaker 04

  Uh, just to, I mean, those are really to just engage the audience and to get them pumped up for the show that they're about to see. That's, that's pretty much it. It's like, it's like going to a stadium and they play, you know.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  We will rock you.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah. But then what, we're more interested in, in what you might call like the Broadway overture because this is an approach to writing an overture where you do the same thing. You get the audience excited, you get them jazzed up, but you do it by taking all this music from the show they're about to see and putting it into like a compact little medley. You can take the example of a show like West Side Story. You know, that multi-hour musical gets condensed down into like a five-minute medley. We can play just a few excerpts from it right now.

• 17:33Speaker 04

  So we go from the song "Tonight, Tonight" to "Maria, Maria."

• 17:51Speaker 04

  And then to the climactic, it's called mambo, but it's like the big fight scene and the rumble scene, kind of.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  So you're getting like all the material from the show you're about to see, and it's kind of getting you excited, amping you up for the spectacle that you're about to behold.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Spoiler alert.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, in a way, I guess. It is, yeah.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  That's the classical pass. And I'm hearing, basically, artists taking this classical idea of the overture, probably not intentionally, but with the same effect, trying to get you excited for what's to come right away, right when you sit down in your seat or wherever you are, listening in your car. Song comes on and you're in it. And the way that they're doing that is they're taking a fragment of the most exciting part of the song, the chorus, and they're putting it into the beginning of the song. And there's a couple of different ways that I've heard people try this pop overture. Let's start with Dua Lipa. Her song "One Kiss" begins with a pop overture.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  We can hear how that intro comes again later. Here's the chorus in full.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  And so you get the full version. Here, what she's done is she's sort of applied a filter effect at the intro and given you just a small section of the chorus, not the whole thing, a little fragment of it. Now, the next artist that I hear doing this is Drake. We're gonna talk more about Drake because Drake is really important in the streaming economy. On his song "God's Plan," we are getting that same sort of fragment approach and maybe even a smaller amount of the chorus.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  That's the intro. Simple, not much. Just to remind everyone, if you haven't heard it, I think it's been streamed 2 billion times, but here it is.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Little fragment of the chorus at the very beginning. I have one more clip that I want to play you all, which is Ariana Grande. And she takes this to the extreme. She's gonna take the pop overture, take that little chorus bit in the intro and obfuscate it so that you don't even know what you're hearing until you hear it later. This is her song "NASA."

• 20:57Speaker 01

  So we just get a forecount of this kind of like strange synthesizer in the background, right? Yeah. But check out what happens in the chorus.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Hey, what do you think we're hearing?

• 21:15Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Are you catching it?

• 21:16Speaker 04

  I think you're saying that the pop, that synthesized line we hear at the, what we're calling the pop overture at the beginning of the song is the same melody that she's singing later when the chorus comes in.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  I think it is. That sounds like it to me.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  I agree, it's the melody. I'm not sure if it's not actually a sample of her voice that is then distorted and filtered. Check it out one more time.

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah. That's a good hypothesis, Chuck.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  It's introductory material that you have no idea is particularly important. Like, even her song Break Free with Zed begins with some really wild and interesting synthesizers that don't come back again until much later into the outro. They don't really have a relationship to the rest of the song. And that's a lot uncommon. Sometimes introductory and outro material is something unique to bring you in and take you out of the song. And here, this is like, I'm gonna give you the prize at the end, but it's just a hint of it. Like, maybe you're seeing it from afar.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  So is the idea kind of like, if you're listening to a playlist, that you get the song, like, a taste of the song in the very beginning, and then you can just immediately decide, oh, I'm gonna stick with this long enough to, you know, get that 30-second payout?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  Or if it's not, or you're like, oh, no, I didn't like that little, that 3-second intro, so I'm gonna skip to the next one.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  That's what I'm thinking.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  I find it persuasive.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  What do you all think?

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting reminder of what you're gonna get. So you might stick with the song a bit longer. You get the juices flowing right away, in a way that you're sort of not suspecting, and then the full thing comes on later.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I like this idea of foreshadowing, almost, is what it seems like to me.

• 23:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's good.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  And you're just sort of getting a little taste, and it's the way it is in books, right? You see something, you're like, ooh, I like that. And then later, you're like, oh, my god, that's what it was. I like it even more.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  You know, to your point, I'm actually starting to listen differently now. Because, like, I don't know, I feel like so often introductory material, it feels more throwaway in a lot of popular music, or like, it has, at least, my relationship to it has been as such. And now I'm like, ooh, what is that thing you just did? Is that gonna come back later?

• 23:32Speaker 04

  The recycling approach.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So one of the concerns that Mark Ronson brings up is this question of, like, is the streaming economy incentives fundamentally changing how music is written? And I think there's an important inverse of that question, is, is the way that music is written actually just making shorter songs? It's hard to know which variable is accounting for this effect. And in your article, you talked about the rise of beat-making culture as a way of producing music that may also be contributing to this. What is beat-making culture?

• 24:05Speaker 02

  So, beat-making culture is basically when you... You know, you make a funky beat and then you license that out to other artists or producers and they can sample it. And this is from Jeff Ponchik from Repost. When I spoke to him, and that's a platform that sort of connects artists to streaming platforms. And the idea is, once you get a really good beat and you find that it's lucrative and it's successful, that the greatest incentive is just to license it out and then create another one. So it's kind of like you're producing as quick as possible because you know that this beat is good, so you want to make the next one as quickly as possible.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  So it's kind of like an assembly line approach to pop production or something?

• 24:48Speaker 02

  In a way. And obviously, streaming incentives have sort of heightened the tension between artistic integrity and creating beats that are optimal for streaming. But I do think there is more incentive to create things quicker, and I think Mark Ronson touched on that, too. He talked about how people just write songs in 30 minutes. And in that Guardian interview, he said, "Well, it sounds like you wrote it in 30 minutes." But often with beats, I don't think that's necessarily as obvious in comparison to lyrics.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  I think this gets to the important idea that it's beats mostly that they're making, rather than writing more songs that include bridges and multiple melodies and things like that. And so I think when you have songs that are based on just this one particular beat, it doesn't make sense for the songs to be quite as long if there's not as much variation.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Especially if people are having fun listening to them. Why extend them if it's working? I think this raises a really important question, and sort of to get to the underlying anxiety is, I think I assure you, you mentioned artistic integrity, and this is very real. I think people are concerned, are there bad players out there? Is there fraud? Are people cheating this new system?

• 26:06Speaker 02

  There are people who have been trying to cheat the streaming system, as you say. So one sort of high-profile case was this band called Volpeq. And what they did was that they created this silent album. And they encouraged their fans to sort of play this album on repeat as they slept, over and over again.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  I believe it was called Sleepify.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Exactly, Sleepify. And then they said to their fans that the money generated from those streams would be used to fund their next tour. So in a way, you know, I don't know if the impetus behind that was sinister or not, but either way, they were totally cheating the system.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was another scam in Bulgaria that was not, you know, I don't think there were any good reasons for it, like the Volf Beck one. They made about $1 million, this group of people in Bulgaria who just created fake Spotify accounts and played a third-party playlist over and over and over. And yeah, a million dollars out of it. Pretty good.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, just to jump in on that, that's sort of on the production side or the artist side. There have also been cases where fans have been cheating the system, right? And I think the most high-profile of these cases is Harry Styles and then BTS fans. And for those who don't know, BTS, which is short for the Bangtan Boys, is this really popular K-pop group. And their fans sort of systematically bought US premium accounts and distributed those login details all across the world and convinced other fans to sort of stream over and over and over again. They even used VPNs to like, sort of trick the servers. And that made it seem like, you know, the songs were skyrocketing to the top of the charts. And now it's really hard to know what was fraud and what was real.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, you don't want to mess with the army. That's the name of the BTS fans.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Yes, the BTS army.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  That's wild. I, unlike Mark Ronson, though, I definitely empathize as a fellow neurotic Jew in general about his, you know, anxieties about the state of the world. I, this, this particular thing, the, how streaming is changing the sound of music, doesn't keep me up at night. Because I think as we've talked about, it's, this is maybe part of a cyclical, a cyclical aspect of the music industry, right? You know, albums have not been around that long. They're a relatively new phenomenon. They've only been around since the 60s. 1948 was the LP. Oh, no, no, Charlie, but that, that wasn't an album. The LP, this is actually-

• 28:34Speaker 01

  This is really interesting. So the LP was invented in 1948, but album-oriented music only took off in the late 60s when people sort of finally took advantage of that extra length. Similarly, Spotify came out in 2006, sort of the most dominant streaming platform. And now we're talking, you know, 14 years later, 13 years later, people are now responding to this new medium. And there's sort of this lag time between these new technologies gaining dominance within the industry. Yeah, I see what you mean. But to your point, yeah, things have always fluctuated. I mean, for example, Dan, you were mentioning earlier that songs used to be a lot shorter. When I saw all of these concerns about song lengths, I went to absurd lengths to build a database of

• 29:19Speaker 01

  all the number one songs since they've been documented, I think since 1937 was the earliest I could go back. And songs used to be about three minutes long back in the 30s and 40s. But half of that song was often an instrumental. So if you took a song like "All The Things You Are" by Tommy Dorsey, the 1940 recording.

• 29:40Speaker 08

  You are the promised kiss of springtime that makes the lonely winter seem long.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  There is just one minute and six seconds of lyrics in a three-minute and 19-second song. The rest is instrumental that basically does the same melody as the lyric with maybe a little intro and outro. And so I don't think anyone's questioning, is "All The Things You Are," is it a good song, bad song because of its length? It's almost a, it's a kind of, I think, a ridiculous question. If you walked into a gallery and you're like, man, canvas sizes are getting really small, or they're getting really big. It's like, is that really that indicative of what's happening within the frame?

• 30:26Speaker 03

  In my opinion, the best album of 2018 was Tierra Wax's "Whack World." "Whack World."

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:33Speaker 09

  Diamonds in my pearl. I said, "Thank you, I designed it." Not your average girl.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  For those who don't know, Tiara Wax's debut album, Wack World, was made up of 15 songs that were one minute or less. And one minute is also the maximum length of an Instagram video. And each song had an accompanying video. So I see that album as sort of this example of playing around and manipulating with these confines of like the shorter song and creating, you know, in your words, like a smaller canvas and maybe just putting more in it, which I think is interesting.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  It felt almost like a commentary on the song. This is like commentary on the song form, because when I listened to it, every single time it got to the minute mark, I was like, oh, I want more of it. Which is actually really effective, because you're like, I could go back and listen again.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's a really good tactic. But just to your previous point about how, you know, songs have always been shorter, but now there is this sort of anxiety. I think that anxiety is tied to like brevity in popular culture or digital platforms as a whole. People are concerned about, you know, like culture, where we just respond to everything with a thumbs up or just an emoji. And we're just like scrolling through Instagram videos or Snapchat videos kind of numbly. And I think this anxiety over shorter songs or maybe the diminishing quality of music because of shorter songs is actually tied to maybe the diminishing quality of our communication or interaction with each other because of the way that social media has pervaded like society.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Hmm. Well, it is the deep existential angst working its way.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  I think that's, I should, I think that's, if I can be so bold, I think that's a great place to end this conversation. Because to me, like what this, what this, you know, your expertise and like bringing in both some audio examples and some, some facts about this have made me realize like, oh, you can't, like you ultimately, you can't cheat the system, like you can't trick someone into listening to a song. Like people are only going to listen to music if they like it, and they're not if they don't. So it's not like, music isn't getting any better or worse as a result of this, but the way we feel about it says a lot about what we're scared of in general, right?

• 32:56Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Totally. Wow. You all brought so much thought into this conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been so much fun.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having us.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you so much.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  You can go check out Aisha and Dan's piece, "The Reason Why Your Favorite Pop Songs Are Getting Shorter", on Quartz, and we'll put it in our show notes. I want to say thanks to Jeremy Lloyd from Arian Hill, Chris Malanfi from Slate. Go check out his show, Hit Parade, it's great. And I want to say a special thanks to Courtney Leonard, Crystal Stephens, and Georgia Cowley for making Switched on Pop look great. You might not have noticed, but we got a little bit of a makeover. And the design team from Vox, I think, has just done an outstanding job. So, thank you so much. Switched on Pop is a production of Vox Media. Executive production by Nishat Kurwa and Alison Rocky. Production by Jillian Weinberger. Engineering by Brandon McFarland. Community manager, Sarah Terry.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  You can find more shows on any podcast you play or you use, Apple Podcast app, Spotify, so on, so forth. I'm thinking now, though, Charlie, all our shows should be kept to about three... Yeah, maybe just like two minutes and 50 seconds.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. Let's try that. That'd be fun.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  You can find more episodes as well on switchedonpop.com. And we love getting your suggestions on Twitter and Instagram. We are at @switchedonpop. We are going to be back again in another week. So, we will see you next Tuesday. And until then, thanks for listening.