The thesis of the article is that the payment structure is incentivizing artists to record shorter songs.
But this also means that the platforms should have an equal incentive to make listeners listen to longer ones. Spotify seems to pay out about $7 billion / year in music licensing. If they can make the average song listened to by a user just 1 second longer, they reduce that by about 0.5%. That's saving like $35 million / year for each second! Move the average up by 10 seconds, and it's enough to actually make Spotify profitable.
Considering how much of the modern music listening is driven by algorithms either directly or through recommendations, it seems like it'd be incredibly easy for a streaming platform to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the longer songs being what gets listened to. That in turn should make the artists record longer songs. Why isn't that happening?
Or is it happening, and the current state is just the equilibrium we've arrived at when those competing incentives were resolved?
> If they can make the average song listened to by a user just 1 second longer, they reduce that by about 0.5%.
This isn't how music royalties work - rather, Spotify (and most other on demand streaming services) pay out a % of their net revenue to rights holders. This % does not change based on how many streams there are in total, but it IS distributed proportionally based on the number of streams, so it's more profitable for a music rightsholder to have more streams (the topic of the article).
They both seem primitive. If a user paid $10/month for a subscription, each month they should divvy that $10 to the proportional minutes listened of each artist for that month. That’s paying out to the people that are keeping that person subscribed. Minus Spotify’s cut of course
Right? As a user, if I listen to 2 hours of content split equally between sources A and B, it seems fair that they each get half of my subscription fee (less Spotify's cut). Regardless of if A views B's content as "less worthy". On the other hand I wouldn't sign up for a monthly white noise service and if A went on strike and didn't renew license agreements, that's what Spotify would become. Record labels do have leverage over white noise which is a commodity (right? y'all aren't beholden to certain streams are you??)
I actually do have certain episodes/streams saved that are my go-tos.
Navigating "rain sounds" has become a lot more difficult lately specifically due to record labels complaining, particularly if you want one continuous 8hr stream. Instead all I can find now are playlists with a bunch of things I don't want. If I didn't have my favorites already saved I wouldn't be able to find them at all now.
Whenever I've done analysis of classic popular songs, songs that I like, I'm always a bit shocked by how quick they tend to be. If there's an intro, the intro is often super short, like 4 or even 2 bars. Like you said, having a hook early in the song was always a good idea.
Some of the iconic classical pieces start with a "hook" too. Or, at least, a very compelling motive.
This exactly. Beethoven's fifth symphony drops the hook/motive as the first five notes. It's no coincidence that Mozart's Dies Irae (Requiem) or Orff's O Fortuna (Carmina Burana) are frequently repurposed since they start with a bang.
An interesting nuance of this is dance music, where the orinals can be 7 minutes long with 60+ second intros of just percussion and little musical interest, designed to make them mixable for DJs in clubs.
The core of the song may only be 3 minutes, and that is what you get in radio edits. Half my bought music collection comes from when I DJd, and you can't really throw the full length songs on shuffle else you'd spend all your time listening to minute long intros and outros.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that this structure is becoming less common (in some subgenres of dance music at least) because everyone now DJs on CDJs where it’s trivial to loop the intro and control when the song drops in (and use EQ/filter), rather than relying on a long intro with elements coming in.
While you might edit a long song down to a radio-friendly length, I think most songs start out short enough to be radio-friendly in the first place. 3 minutes is about the natural for a typical verse-chorus-bridge structure song. Cut out the bridge and the song will probably clock in closer to 2 minutes.
These longer songs, like Foreplay / Long Time, have a lot more going on. More ideas. More sections. Dramatic crescendos. Extended instrumental parts. They're harder to write.
The standard verse-chorus-bridge structures are popular because it's a really damn good way to write a song.
I immediately thought of Revolver with Eleanor Rigby (chorus), Good Day Sunshine (chorus), and Paperback Writer (chorus hook) at least.
Speaking of classics for the ages, Nickelback's How You Remind Me drops the hook (and title) at about 15s.
Classic (especially 1980s?) rock seems to have lots of chorus first songs from the likes of Guns N' Roses, Cheap Trick, Journey, Stevie Nicks, Bon Jovi, Slade/Quiet Riot, David Bowie, etc.
The hook comes before the chorus, and it's very good. But I think the Kinks' You Really Got Me from the previous year (1964) hits harder out of the gate.
Many rock songs start with great hooks/riffs though. I am particularly fond of 20 foot tall guitar riff hooks/intros as practiced by classic hard rock and metal bands, often by doubling the riff/hook on lead guitar and bass.
Rock bands seem to excel at intros, and even the lengthy ones can be riveting.
And some song intros are so great that they overshadow the rest of the song.
A way to cheat on this is to have the intro technically be a separate song. Playing the album you get an extended intro, but you can just play the "main" song.
The start of Judas Priest's "Screaming for Vengeance" album does this with "The Hellion" blending in to "Electric Eye". "Electric Eye" also has one of the greatest riff/hooks in metal starting off right at the beginning of the song.
Interesting - I don't think I'd heard Not California before.
An oddity that has become increasingly popular over nearly 20 years (breaking records for stream counts and singles chart tenure) is the Killers' Mr. Brightside, which only has one (repeated) verse. Which probably makes it a good singalong anthem.
It also starts with a nice (if short) guitar riff/hook.
Not an expert, but isn't most classical music like that? Most long pieces (e.g., concertos?) start with the main theme that gets unpacked in later parts of the performance.
Kinda but also true that most long pieces have one or two movements that are the popular ones and you have to wait till you get to it. e.g. Ode to Joy is 45+ minutes into the Ninth symphony, Mozart's Rondo alla Turca is the third movement of the K 331 sonata, etc.
Though I feel very bad writing ^^^. The rest of those pieces are very worth listening to. I listen more often to the first movement of the Ninth.
> Kinda but also true that most long pieces have one or two movements that are the popular ones and you have to wait till you get to it.
Is it by design? Was the composer aware that a certain part would end up being that one exceptionally popular one?
The probabiliy that a part not at the beginning is (becomes) popular is higher than for the part at the beginning, because there's more parts not at the beginning than the one at the beginning.
Streaming definitely destroyed sampling as a musical method: every sampled recording house wants their slice of the pie, and if the income is low as it is with streaming records, you minimise your sampling to keep more pie to yourself.
Many early great hip hop albums that rely heavily on sampling are not on streaming services because the sampled record companies can't come to an agreement, and I'm sure today's artists see the hassle and minimise their sampling.
Examples are Frank Ocean's 'Nostalgia, Ultra' and De La Soul's '3 Feet High and Rising'
This is an interesting take. A lot of the big artists these days (Doja Cat, Megan thee Stallion, Charli XCX, to name a few) all heavily sample.
In some cases the new hits have multiple levels of sampling; Latto’s Big Energy has a remix with Mariah Carey’s Fantasy, and both sample Tom Tom Club’s Genius of Love. Charli XCX interpolates both Hey Mickey and Robyn for her new song from the Barbie movie.
There are entire genres (hip hop, reggaeton, dancehall, etc.) that have sampling built into their DNA, and are still going strong, even outside the big acts. And they are still sampling, it's far from dead.
>De La Soul’s sampling artistry made digitizing the catalog they built over their career a monumental task, as samples previously cleared for use on vinyl, cassettes and CDs had to be redone for streaming.
I listen to a lot of more left field music styles, and it seems like the trend is almost in the complete other direction. Styles and genres like ambient music or field recordings, that aggressively don't try to capture your attention immediately are definitely having a bit of a heyday. I'd be interested whether this is to some level a reaction to mainstream music's getting shorter.
Don't forget the 12" disco versions of songs in the 70's and 80's! The disco version was lengthened and mixed with a much heavier bass line. The grooves on a 12" single were spaced further apart to accommodate this.
It wasn't even just disco, that was a general fashion back then.
I remember Trevor Horn writing in his book, labels asked him for 12" mixes of singles he produced in the 80's. And it was mostly new wave and pop stuff.
I guess the purpose was the same though, to produce a more danceable version.
The sound/structure was changed many times before to make an album sellable, for the radio, to make venues sell more beer, to help the graphical aspect when shown on MTV and the list goes on.
Yes, but… it used to be that the leading radio station in each local market would have their own idiosyncratic variation of what they demanded from songs, so the edges would get softened.
Now there is a single leading global music streaming service. You don’t just have to deal with the generalities of the medium, you have to deal with Spotify’s specific idiosyncraticies.
If technology through streaming, AI, and other enshittifying forces are scaling up pre-existing bullshit from annoying trends into absolute omnipresence, that's worth recognizing and talking about as its own phenomenon.
This take doesn't resonate with me at all. The music is scene is fantastic right now and the insane amount of collaborations will be remembered in 20 years as a musical era.
Literally everyone's preferred era of music is someone's "todays music is bad rabble rabble." Even classical was considered inferior and simplistic by people who preferred music from the baroque period. Like its original critics literally said that classical was too repetitive.
Yeah shorter radio edits have been around a long time. As an artist, if you want to make longer songs just release 2 versions, sure there are some just chasing dollars who do not care about that
My gripe is the newer recommendations algos seem worse than those from 10 years ago, like there was nothing wrong with simple "people who liked this song also played these songs" I listen to many genres so I think my listening profile is a bit diluted/varied
In the periodisation GP is referring to, I believe Boléro would be Modernist, not Classical. The latter [0] refers to works by e.g. Mozart and Haydn, and followed the Baroque period of e.g. J.S. Bach.
(Incidentally, I do find Classical music quite repetitive — although on the other hand I’ve long enjoyed Boléro. Curious!)
Haha reminds me of Lorenzo, a French rapper who split his album into 68 30-second tracks just to mess with Spotify. The album got withdrawn within minutes but the buzz worked well!
Why is it that a “play” is defined by a discrete threshold line 30 seconds? Isn’t it way more logical to define some continuous relationship between amount of time played and amount of money generated like it’s done on YouTube?
Should a 6 minute song pay 50% more than a 4 minute song?
Most people would think not. So you should pay by play, rather than per minute.
YouTube is different because number of ads shown is roughly proportional to video length. Variance in video durations is much, much higher than variance in song durations.
And 30 seconds is much longer than most people skipping through songs, and much shorter than most songs, and a nice round number.
I definitely wouldn't want the economic incentive to be for artists to make all their songs 10-20 minutes long...
But more importantly, for popular music, song length doesn't correlate to work or effort, generally speaking. A 6 minute song doesn't take 50% more effort than a 4 minute one.
(Other genres like classical are different though -- a 25-minute long symphonic movement obviously takes ~5x as much work to both write and record than a 5-minute one.)
The economic incentive should be for you to create as much good content as possible. If you have a continuous relationship between time listened and money generated, then it doesn’t matter if you have one 40 minute song or 15 songs totaling 40 minutes.
It does not seem especially obvious that the price of a product should depend on the cost of its input and not on the value of its output? We can quibble about whether "time that a user spends listening" is correctly what a streaming service wants to buy from an artist, but it doesn't seem like the reasonable metric.
> Other genres like classical are different though -- a 25-minute long symphonic movement obviously takes ~5x as much work to both write and record than a 5-minute one.
This makes sense. Every time I listen to 4’33” I am moved to tears and the thought of losing even a few seconds of that composition is abhorrent.
On YouTube I'd assume pay for music videos is generally similar, because music videos don't really have mid-roll ads (at least I've never gotten an ad in the middle of a song).
Maybe due to post-roll ads people finishing the song could lead to extra revenue though.
Fascinated / saddened by the effect of modern economic trends on music, but it is what it is. However,
> Before the Temptations sing a word, an instrumental introduction featuring organ, guitar, bass, and a hi-hat cymbal ebbs and flows for more than four minutes.
Seems like this should refer to about 2 minutes of instrumental intro based (ironically?) on my listening to the ca. 7 minute version on Spotify. Am I missing something?
An oldies band from the 1940s, The Ink Spots, would play a 3-second bass guitar melody before every song. Back then, if the DJ did not announce the name of the band or song, the melody would act as an identifier.
This article is pretty sloppy. There are 2 different versions. The 7 minute release has vocals coming in just under 2 minutes. The 12 minute version has vocals kicking in just under 4 minutes. So the characterization that the intro "ebbs and flows for more than four minutes" is incorrect in all possible counts.
And in aggregate pop music has always been objectively terrible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJV2pWFyfn4 has the vocals come in at 4:02 which I guess very technically is over 4 minutes, but it's a vinyl recording that starts ~5 seconds before the beginning of the song.
I think streaming killed the "album", sure there were always singles, but they would be used to promote an upcoming album, now musicians and labels keep it at that. I miss the days of getting a new cd and moving the last one from my cars cd player to the visor cd sleeve.
Behind the scenes there is a lot more going on than just songs getting shorter. I'll focus on Spotify as it's the firm I'm most familiar with. The article briefly touches on the hook being moved to the beginning, so I'll skip that part - much the same thing is happening on streaming platforms for movies/tv shows, where analytics are used to determine the ordering and features of a piece of content to maximise engagement/minimise churn - at the expense of directorial freedom.
There are 2 other significant factors at play. The first is that not all streams are created equal. It is relatively well known that the large studios have cut deals on payouts per stream, eg. $0.0029 vs $0.002, depending on the artist's following, age of the album, etc. But, a lesser known fact is that not all streams are created equal in a number of countries. Songs played is sequence on an album, or as part of a playlist, may attract a lesser premium than individual plays, and radio broadcast format pays less still. How it works depends on the jurisdiction/contract. With this in mind, consider how you listen to songs on Spotify. You may search for songs and albums, but a large proportion of the music you hear probably comes from autoplay, where Spotify matches what it 'thinks' you might like to hear.
With the above in mind, Spotify has been acquiring podcast companies and building them into their client for several years. There is undoubtedly an audience for podcasts, but the business case is that they do not have any of the licensing legacy issues that music has, where Spotify gets to keep a bigger piece of the pie.
The point in the article - that 'songs are getting shorter, albums are getting longer, and artists are collaborating across genres' is mostly a result of artists producing to satisfy a recommendation algorithm that balances retaining listeners, whilst minimising licensing costs.
The collaborating across genres is also explainable; several years ago, Spotify bought a company called Echonest (amongst others), which was essentially a large graph database mapping songs and their musical attributes (genres), onto which a recommendation engine was built - it's worth looking up their whitepapers on matrix factorisation at scale if they still exist. The corrolary though, is that similar listening habits could be used to cross-recommend songs with a good degree of accuracy.
There are also a smattering of other considerations to take into account - a lot of the large playlists not operated by Spotify are pay to play - if you're a new artist, you can pay to feature on playlists for a given genre. There is no official channel for doing this, but the practice is widespread. These playlists make more money if they have 50 x 3 minute songs, than 30 x 5 minute songs.
I'm sure you can see where this is going - a cost/engagement optimisation engine, along with a recommendation engine where artist remuneration is more or less directly proportional to the number of people that are happy to listen to it if it is played for them.
The artist is rewarded if they produce a larger number of songs, suitably homogenised to appeal to the mass market and sound familiar to what they already listen to, and to hit as many of the genres possible to maximise inclusion in recommendations. Unless you are one of the few exceptional artists, you are going to be punished for creativity vs. playing it safe.
There's no easy fix for this, assuming it needs fixing. All media streaming platforms in the long run chase the marginal user, who by and large wants average content almost by definition.
Tweaking the remuneration model would be a good starting point, where instead of Spotify taking eg. 30% of the subscription, and paying $0.0018-0.0032 per stream depending on artist, if instead the model worked as Spotify taking 30%, and each artist payout for a user's streams was calculated as ($10 * 0.7) * (number of plays by user of artist songs / total plays in given period), one would likely see artists serving niches or esoteric music to be better remunerated, albeit at the expense of the studios managing household name artists.
Hasn't corporatisation/marketing of music always 'changed the sound'? I can't even think what non-commercial music would sound like, unless it's classic folk tunes, and even then...
Every part of the world has it's own local sound, although perhaps less and less and less these days.
There's always been "music people play to be social" with a line from that to "music people play to make some extra cash at the local shindig" which is the essetial core of commercial music - if you want the money you have to appeal to the crowd.
Anyhow, for what it's worth - back in the day we'd drift into the nearest big town once a month or so and typically have an all night get together | jam session with these people (and others) .. it's classic folk but particular to a specific bit of the world:
I think it's less than the effect of people listening to music on small phone speakers. There's a definite shift to mixes that are listenable on a phone speaker.
I once read something about a famous music producer and/or mastering engineer who said his mixing and mastering goes through two first passes: first on his studio monitors, then - before testing the final master on real-world speakers for final polishing - he would adjust everything in the mix again to sound good one his cheapest Mackie studio monitors.
Can't seem to find the original article, so maybe I mixed up some details.
Also, I agree with OP, I hate how mainstream productions nowadays target the lowest common denominator of speakers.
Of course they have to, but in this current age of phone speakers it really starts to show annoying effects.
Small BT speakers and even in-ears have become surprisingly OK though, also for music which doesn't participate in the loudness wars as much.
Also seems like these might be what most music is consumed on.
It's pretty standard mixing advice to mix on monitors that are as flat as possible (add no color of their own) but to test the final mix on car radios, headphones etc to make some adjustments.
Back in the day I checked out my nephew's Beats headphones and quite honestly thought they were broken because the bass on them was pumped up so much that it was a muddy mess. The mixer's job is getting harder and harder with the tradeoffs they have to make between phone speakers with no bass and vanity headphones with nothing but bass.
Brian Eno has talked about optimizing his mixes for mid-range speakers to suit the widest number of listeners possible... might be what you're thinking of?
Is it? Certainly streaming compression + tinny phone speakers take a toll, but I would have guessed AM radio was still worse, at least on the perceptual measures that actually matter.
"Radio" played an infinitesimally small amount of the music that was being produced. If you wanted to discover new music, the last thing you'd do is turn to the radio. Spotify is both 'radio' and a music discovery service, and global in nature, so its impact is much greater. And unlike radio stations that tend to specialize in a certain sound (pop, classical, rock, jazz, hiphop), Spotify mixes everything together. A lot of contemporary music is 'genre-less' as a result. That was never the case with radio.
The BBC's John Peel:
Peel was one of the first broadcasters to play psychedelic rock and progressive rock records on British radio. He is widely acknowledged for promoting artists of many genres, including pop, dub reggae, punk rock and post-punk, electronic music and dance music, indie rock, extreme metal and British hip hop. Fellow DJ Paul Gambaccini described Peel as "the most important single person in popular music from approximately 1967 through 1978. He broke more important artists than any individual." [wikipedia]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geI2TbD3ihM
The UK was in a special place with regard to radio music discovery, though. John Peel originally started on pirate radio where he could play whatever he wanted. That created such a demand within the UK that he was able to move to a job at the BBC doing the same thing and draw a listenership from the whole country. But since HN is so American-centric, most of the posters here know radio of that time only as a much less adventurous format, unless you could listen to a “college radio” station (the USA’s only real analogue to Peel). Otherwise, corporate ownership of stations, with local stations receiving their playlist from corporate, meant no adventurous programming.
Several of my favourite artists have "Peel Sessions". But that was an entirely different era of history; the last episodes were over 25 years ago I think.
Peel ran his show on a state broadcaster network (BBC Radio 1), in a country where the state provided significant arts funding until the 1980s or so. That created a culture where it was possible to record and perform music full-time without living on the street. Many bands met at state-funded, zero-tuition art colleges. Those days are long gone.
You're claiming radio didn't really affect discovery, when radio music discovery was being regulated by federal law and driving congressional hearings by the 1950s.
Radio changed music as much as streaming did, and before streaming, MTV did too.
I'm saying that radio isn't good for discovery, precisely because its selection is so narrow compared to an on-demand catalog of algorithmically selected music that Spotify provides.
“If you wanted to discover new music, the last thing you'd do is turn to the radio”
Really? What would people do, then?
I grew up in the 70s/80s in a small town. No music store, not even a Walmart until the mid-80s.
Pre-MTV, radio was pretty much the only mechanism for hearing new music, excepting maybe small doses of new stuff via SNLs musical act or someone on the talk shows.
I don’t think much (popular) contemporary music is genre-less. Fair number of crossover songs, maybe, but that’s not new.
Also, college radio (non-profit, staffed by student and community volunteers, usually at the low end of the FM dial) was a great place to be exposed to wide variety. In fact, record companies used to (and to some extent maybe still do) provide promo copies of many new releases to college radio and depended on feedback to fashion their marketing.
There's already more recorded music in existence than you could listen to in a lifetime. There is also a vast amount of music being created today which is not pop music and is not following current pop trends.
While not directly related, fellow readers might also find the memo titled "Dave Goldberg on music"[1] to be an interesting prediction around the future of music as it comes to streaming.
As a bit more background, it was a memo sent to then-CEO of Sony Entertainment Michael Lynton by Dave Goldberg[2] who was most recently known as CEO of SurveyMonkey but had been the Director of Marketing Strategy at Capital Records in the early 90s.
I'm not entirely sure when it was sent but according to my notes, it was originally sent in the form of an email, and was released as part of the Sony Pictures hack from 2014.
Anyway, the gist of the memo recommends that back-catalogue becomes the core of the business, as that's where the most streams occur with the new release business being greatly scaled down with a focus on music that will have longevity.
> Music is becoming a purely digital product. A digital-only recorded music company will be a much more profitable one after one-off restructuring costs.
> Catalog needs to be defined much more broadly to include all music that hasn¹t been created in the last 2 years
> With catalog providing the base profits, new releases need to be cut back dramatically to the point where the new business either breaks even or loses a small amount of money (justified by the long term catalog income stream of those songs)
> This will bias new releases to genres like rock and country that typically have had strong catalog. These also happen to be the genres that don’t have expensive producers so more music can be created for the same A&R dollars
> Artist contracts that have large fixed marketing costs will need to be restructured or sold off as there will no longer be headcount to do the work. New releases will be tested on consumers before added money is spent to ensure that it isn’t wasted.
> Internationally, most local repertoire will probably have to be eliminated. The record company will want to sell off the local repertoire or spin out the local labels and focus on English language repertoire globally, unless there is some country that has managed to be profitable on its local repertoire (i.e.Japan)
Not all of this necessarily came to pass, and some of it sounds a little miserable, but it's an interesting peek at some thinking at the time, at least from a consultant.
