Three and a half minutes. For decades, this was pretty much the standard length of a top-50 song. Long enough to set up a melody, a chorus multiplied by two or three, a bridge and the occasional solo. Today, this format is almost a rarity in the charts. On Spotify or TikTok, tracks are getting shorter by the minute. Some hit songs barely exceed two minutes. Others start directly with the chorus, with no intro or gradual build-up. Even artists renowned for their conceptual albums sometimes condense. So, is this just a passing fad or a profound transformation in the way we listen to music? Spoiler: a bit of both.
TikTok, Spotify and the era of the instant track
In 2024, the average length of a US Billboard hit hovered around 3 minutes and 15 seconds. In the '90s, it often exceeded 4 minutes. And if we go back to the '70s, the heyday of long solos and soaring intros, some radio standards flirted with 6 or 7 minutes (hello Joe Walsh and his acolytes). Today, the most heavily streamed tracks are straight to the point: the chorus sometimes arrives before the first 20 seconds, intros disappear, and even the fade-out at the end seems to belong to another era. This is also the case in rap and electro, which have historically favored long constructions.
This reduction in song length is largely due to the platforms on which they’re delivered. On TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, a song no longer necessarily exists as a complete work, but as an immediately identifiable extract. Fifteen seconds can be enough to transform a song into a viral phenomenon. The result: many artists now compose around a precise moment, the famous “hook." a phrase, a sonic gimmick, a drop designed to be taken up, diverted or remixed in thousands of videos.
Spotify has changed the structure of songs
Effectively, trying to understand this evolution without talking about streaming is mission impossible. On Spotify, a stream is counted after about 30 seconds of listening. You don’t need to be an economist to understand what this means: the shorter a song is, the more likely it is to be replayed quickly. Two two-minute songs listened to in succession potentially generate more streams than a single four-minute track. In an industry where revenue depends on the number of streams, this ultimately influences the writing itself. What’s more, if Spotify’s algorithm perceives that a track’s play rate is high, there’s a much greater chance of that track being highlighted in the platform’s auto “radio stations” or playlists.
But the most interesting thing is elsewhere: streaming has also transformed the way we listen. Where albums once imposed a long time and a certain amount of attention, playlists encourage fragmented consumption. We listen in transit, while scrolling, while working, between two notifications. The song becomes just another piece of content in a continuous flow. In this context, long intros à la Pink Floyd or slow builds à la LCD Soundsystem become almost counter-cultural. A song must catch on fast, or risk being “skipped."
Long pieces still resist the invader
Still, the ultra-short song hasn’t prevailed everywhere. Alongside compressed formats designed for scrolling, long tracks continue not only to exist, but also to find a real audience. In 2021, Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” (10-Minute Version) even became the longest song in history to reach number one on the US Billboard charts. Ten minutes is an absolute counter-current to today’s standards.
In rap, Kendrick Lamar or Tyler, The Creator continue to build evolving tracks, where moods change, productions branch off, and narratives take time to unfold. On the electronic side, the current success of ambient, with its extended formats, remains almost the norm: long ascents, hypnotic repetitions, instrumental tracks… some tracks still easily exceed ten minutes.
The paradox is that streaming also encourages this diversity. In the heyday of FM radio, tracks often had to adhere to a precise format if they hoped to air. Today, the Internet allows many more atypical tracks to find their audience. A 12-minute techno loop, an interminable ambient piece or an instrumental track with no chorus can coexist perfectly with a 1-minute-and-40-second TikTok hit in the same playlists. That’s what makes the power of this platform so strangely hard to pin down.
What about us?
At heart, this story goes beyond the music. If songs are getting shorter, it may be because a large majority of listeners no longer consume music as they used to and are seeing their attention spans fragment. Online platforms have accustomed our brains to fast, immediately gratifying, and constantly renewed content.
However, isn’t it a bit easy to blame the online platforms for everything? Chanting “TikTok is destroying music” is a bit of a cop-out. After all, every era has shaped its formats. Vinyl limited the length of tracks. Radio imposed its standards. MTV changed the way we thought about music videos.
While it’s true that platforms and algorithms are redesigning song structure, in the end, isn’t it also up to the listener to do the job? To “discipline” their listening, to give importance to what’s in their ears by giving it a real chunk of their time? A bit like a movie lover devoting one hour and thirty minutes of their week to a film rather than slaloming between programs on Netflix. Two minutes or ten, in the end, the real challenge has never been the duration. It’s what you can do with the time you devote to what you love. With that, I leave you. I’ve got fifteen minutes to spend with Herbie Hancock and the Head Hunters.