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‘Evolving Away From Clip-Based Music:’ Why Hit Songs Got Longer in 2024
Surprisingly, the average length of top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 rose by more than 20 seconds last year.
Blame for this has fallen on shrinking attention spans, an environment of endless musical abundance in which songs must impress themselves on listeners quickly or risk being discarded, and the rise of short-form video platforms, which cause users to fall in love with 15-second sound snippets, rendering a full track irrelevant. These are the musical equivalents of doorstops, more than twice as long as the shortest top 10, Tate McRae ‘s “Greedy.” And those hits seem downright laconic next to Drake ‘s “Family Matters,” released in the middle of his venomous, no-holds-barred showdown with Lamar, which ran past 7:30. But perhaps counterintuitively, when “any catchy part of a song could be what grabs people’s attention,” this may end up loosening the constraints binding commercial songwriters, according to Matt MacFarlane, senior vp of publishing at Artist Partner Group.
Or read this on Billboard