Why are songs getting shorter?
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 September 2024
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Szu Yu Chen, a graphics reporter at The Washington Post, was covering this year’s Grammy Awards, she couldn’t help but notice how many nominated songs came in under three minutes. The more she looked into it – analyzing Billboard charts and interviewing artists – the more she realized this was a real trend. Meanwhile, when “Post Reports” audio engineer Sean Carter was working in a recording studio in Atlanta, he kept observing a similar shift, too.
Today, Carter guest hosts “Post Reports,” in conversation with Chen, exploring what’s driving this change in music, and what’s gained and lost as a result.
Today’s show was produced by Elana Gordon, edited by Monica Campbell and mixed by Rennie Svirnovsky.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Ella Hey, on this Labor day, I thought we'd bring you something fun and different. |
| 0:07.0 | I don't know about you, but I've been noticing songs coming out now are really short. Well we haven't imagined it. This is a real |
| 0:15.2 | trend and there are some surprising reasons behind it. So today on September 2nd |
| 0:21.0 | and post reports we're going to dig into this and bring you a conversation |
| 0:24.8 | between Sue you Chen, a graphics reporter at the post and our audio engineer Sean |
| 0:29.2 | Carter. I'm really excited for this conversation also because Sean has a background in music engineering |
| 0:36.0 | and he's produced a lot of his own music. |
| 0:38.8 | Sue you has done some fascinating reporting on music lengths. |
| 0:42.4 | They started off talking about one of last year's hits, |
| 0:45.6 | Kill Bill by CISA. This was the finalist for Song of the Year and it was part of her |
| 0:50.5 | Grammy winning album. Okay, here's Sean. Sue you. |
| 1:03.0 | Hey. I didn't realize that this song was like around to miss in 30 seconds. |
| 1:06.0 | I always thought it was it was longer. I guess that means I was just playing it. I was just had a long loop back to back to back to back. |
| 1:12.0 | I know I love that too and yeah I before I checked the duration of the song I didn't realize |
| 1:19.2 | it's only less than three minutes how how crazy is that? Right? So, Sue you, what made you do a deep dive into |
| 1:26.5 | this data about why songs are getting shorter? So I'm a big music fan. I listened to k-pop with my sister and I remember last year hearing |
| 1:36.8 | BTS one of the most popular k-pop groups talking about you know the trend of songs getting shorter in the music industry. |
| 1:47.0 | For example, their hit song, Butter, released in 2021 was last than three minutes long and then there's Japanese pop so my friends and I are both huge |
| 2:01.5 | J-pop fans we're always excited to explore new music from our |
| 2:06.0 | favorite artists and when Fuji Kasey released his new song Hana year. We were both so thrilled because it has such a long intro. |
| 2:16.4 | The song was about four minutes. And then I was like, wait a minute. |
| 2:25.0 | Why am I so hyped about a song being like over three and a half minutes long what's happening here. So I felt like I |
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