The era of 2-minute short songs.

Billie Eilish's lunch is strangely short.

"I Had Some Help" by Post Malone and Morgan Wallen is 2 minutes and 58 seconds long. Tommy Richman's "Million Dollar Baby" is 2 minutes and 35 seconds long. Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" is 2 minutes and 53 seconds long. Finally, Billie Eilish's "Lunch" is 2 minutes and 59 seconds long.

Is short music a new trend?

Even in Beyoncé's new album, Cowboy Carter, which is considered very long at 78 minutes, when divided equally, each song is less than 3 minutes long.

Taylor Swift's songs aren't that short, but even with Swift, the average length of songs on her albums has gradually decreased over time, from Speak Now at nearly 5 minutes per song to Midnights at only about 3 and a half minutes.

This isn't just a trend in the US-UK. When K-pop girl group NewJeans released their mini-album Get Up, fans also complained it was too short!

The mini-album has 6 tracks, but the total duration is only about 12 minutes. The shortest song is 37 seconds long. The longest song is 2 minutes and 35 seconds long.

In Vietnam, this phenomenon is very evident among young artists: from Wren Evans' Loi Choi: The Neo Pop Punk to My Anh's Em, tlinh's Tu Ai to rapper MCK's 99%, all have an average song length of just over 2 minutes.

The whole world seems to have lost interest in listening to long, drawn-out songs. Where are the heyday of rock in the 1970s and 1980s, when listening to a Guns "n" Roses or Led Zeppelin song would easily take over ten minutes?

Along with brevity comes minimalism in lyrics.

According to a study based on over 350,000 English songs published in the journal Nature, the general trend in modern songs is that the language is becoming simpler, the song structure is becoming less complex, and there is more repetition of the same phrase.

Taylor Swift (Midnights "The Late Night Edition") Album Playlist with Lyrics

Are musicians becoming increasingly lazy?

Many people blame TikTok. The rise of fast-paced, instant music —just jumping into a catchy hook or chorus? Certainly encouraged by TikTok. The decline in concentration? That's also a result of TikTok's short-video culture.

Besides TikTok, the online music streaming platform Spotify is also often blamed for the monotony of songs. Audiences need to listen for at least 30 seconds for a stream to generate revenue for the artist. Therefore, the shorter the song, the sooner it gets to the catchy part, the better.

Not to mention, listening to a 10-minute version of Taylor Swift's "All Too Well" only earns you about the same amount of money as the original "All Too Well" which is just over 3 minutes long.

So, aside from a few people who have the "privilege" of having a large audience regardless of how short their music is, why would the rest bother composing longer songs?

Music has now become an economic problem rather than just a source of creative inspiration.

However, there was a time when music was very short. Throughout the 1930s and 1950s, due to the limitations of 78 rpm vinyl records, songs were often short enough to be preserved on them.

It wasn't until the 1960s, when LP records capable of recording 22 minutes of audio, that songs began to get longer, and we started to have tracks like The Beatles' "Hey Jude" or "A Day in the Life," which were 6 or 7 minutes long.

While it could be argued that in the past, musicians composed short pieces out of necessity, a stark contrast to today's situation where musicians intentionally create short pieces for economic gain, isn't the history of aesthetic trends always a spiral?

We will always find ourselves returning to where we started. And who knows, in a few years, when short songs become saturated, a new generation of musicians might indulge us with endlessly long songs?

The truth is, songs are getting shorter and shorter. We barely have time to immerse ourselves in the world of a song before it's already over.

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/thoi-cua-nhac-ngan-2-phut-20240602092817975.htm