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Medium may have taken this advice
For all the years that the internet has been available, song tracks have been 3 minutes long.
Really? Even my favorite song?
This goes for nearly any track, except for some ranging from as little as 2 minutes and sometimes as long as 5 minutes.
Have you ever wondered what made your beat-boppin’ track a certain time limit & why?
Well that’s what I’m gonna share today! After wondering this myself, here are my findings.
It started with rock n’ roll
What didn’t this genre start?
Well here’s another one to add to the list.
Starting off around the 1950’s, music needed to be short n’ catchy.
Along with needing a “10-inch record spinning 78 times per minute”, this usually meant that songs couldn’t be recorded longer than 4 minutes.
To keep both people listening and the record from cutting out, musicians needed to get to the point of their music faster with catchy lyrics.
All about the AD
Simple, there’s more AD’s to be played during the hour with shorter songs than, say, a movie soundtrack.
Psst I saw this somewhere in my notes but couldn’t find the source for my info, this makes sense though, right?
Theory
You know how many popular Medium articles are around 3 minutes?
Well, on streaming services like Spotify,
“Instead of getting paid by physical sales, you’re getting paid in a stream, which only counts if someone listens to 30 seconds of a song,” songwriter Charlie Harding [told The Verge].
“It actually makes sense if you can have more songs streamed at a time, which means that you want to pack your album full of much shorter songs.”
Like Medium, having more songs on our profile both garners more attention and helps artists out if their hook is catchy enough in the 1st 30 seconds.
Why don’t they change it?
Since 3 minutes is short, stays catchy, and is better for production companies pockets, it’s become the standard that isn’t thought much about.
As a Steam Community member notes,
“However, that 3–5 minutes per song just stuck. They consider 2:42 being a perfect length for music, as more people are willing to hear it all and stick with it till the next song. I guess it’s our short attention spans and the fact we have been feed into that our entire life as the norm. Then if some collector wants an old school vinyl copy, they can also have that.”
What do you think about this? Has 3-minute songs lived up to its name, or do you prefer shorter/longer songs?