
Economics of Spotify is making songs shorter - laurex
https://qz.com/1519823/is-spotify-making-songs-shorter/
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jere
One infuriating thing about economic incentives and Spotify:

Very often, when a song comes up, I will want to delete it from my current
playlist because it no longer interests me. In many years it has been
practically _impossible_ in the UI. The only way to do it is to hunt through
thousands of songs, then click on a context menu to delete it, despite this
being something that would be incredibly easy to add to the current song
interface and accomplish in one second (Adding the same song to a playlist is
an option there).

So why is this the case?

I recently realized that preventing me from cleaning up my playlist means MORE
SKIPS for Spotify. They can shove more ads in my face by forcing me to listen
to more stuff I don't care about over time. It sounds silly but I would bet
money that this is the reason considering how technically simple this feature
is and how large the value would be.

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ardit33
Jesus, you are attributing something like this to malice, where it is simply:

It is a power user feature.... and most likely nobody bothered to prioritize
it as it wont be changing any metrics at all.

Spotify (the desktop client), had all kinds of features (drag and drop,
etc..), that were nice but were eventually dropped in the sub-sequential
redesigns. The realization was that less of 2% of the users were using any of
those features, and many of those features had costs (extra code, more
maintenance, etc)....

Of course, many employees are power users themselves, and some were not happy,
but over and over it seems that dropping those features didn't hurt metrics,
actually improved them (usually because the UI got more simplified, less
cluttered).

That little feature is missing, (and annoying you so much) simply because
Spotify is a large company now, and nobody (usually either a PM, or senior
engineer) has thought that including it, because it doesn't have a large
impact.

When the company was smaller, engineers could just jump in and implement
little things that 'annoyed' them. Once the company is large, is gets harder
to do that.

That just how it is in most tech companies when they reach a certain size.

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kefabean
I have to wholeheartedly agree with your parent here.

The whole purpose of playlists is to organise songs, and almost the entire
usecase for removing a song from a playlist is to remove the currently playing
song. I almost never want to remove a song under any other circumstances.

This shouldn’t be a power feature, but Spotify makes it unnecessarily
difficult to do on the fly.

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underwater
You're making a few big leaps here. First that self-built playlists are an
important feature for users, that people are actively managing their
playlists, and that people curate while listening.

Those might all be true for the majority of users, or it might be that you're
an outlier. The only way to know is to actually sample real world users.

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kbutler
It was a beautiful song But it ran too long If you're gonna have a hit You
gotta make it fit So they cut it down to 3:05 \-- Billy Joel, The Entertainer,
1974

To be fair, the article acknowledges songs were already getting shorter in the
90s, after getting longer with LPs and CDs.

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bitcurious

        It was a beautiful song
        but it ran too long
        If you're gonna have a hit
        you gotta make it fit
        So they cut it down to 3:05.
    

Billy Joel in "The Entertainer" referencing the radio cut of "Piano Man."

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drcode
I think it's more likely that the decrease in song length is due to the fact
that "music production" is becoming a highly specialized and advanced field of
work- In the old days, artists just created songs with off-the-cuff lengths...
nowadays, a team of experts are going to mull over every single measure in a
mainstream music track and ask the question: "Is this measure providing enough
value to deserve a spot in this track? If not, these engineers will "refactor"
the song to remove bits that might bore a listener and cause them to play
another track... the fact that spotify now exists is just incidental to this
separate, orthogonal trend in music production.

It's crazy how technical and deep the music production space is becoming.

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briandear
> DAMN. won the Pulitzer Prize for music, going to show that this trend isn’t
> necessarily lowering the quality of music.

A bit of a fallacy. Awards aren’t judged against music ever recorded, but
against peers released in the same year. Quality could very well be going down
or going up, but that would be a trend that can’t be measured across a single
award season.

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briandear
Economics of radio made songs shorter too. Listen to Sun Records tracks and
there are plenty of 3 minute songs. I know a few recording artists with
several million streams and “radio edits” have been a thing for a long time
and not a single one mentions Spotify economics as a motivator for particular
edits. I am not sure that recording artists are actually doing Spotify math
when it comes to their mixes — they’re often just using the same “radio math”
they’ve always done. Pop songs have always been radio friendly. The only
artists that can get away with a Stairway to Heaven length song are Led
Zepplin-level acts, and even then it has to be an extraordinarily massive tune
to get a 5 minute+ song on the radio.

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alkonaut
Long popular songs often had (and have) “radio edits”. This is just that
again, isn’t it?

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lifeisstillgood
33 rpm and 78 rpm singles had much firmer time limits, and much wider impact
on song length.

Yet my preferred song "service" is BGM on youtube - 10 hours of someone
playing jazz. I think we shall see multiple markets developing as song type,
duration and other variables are played with.

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p1necone
Honestly I'm not bothered, the kind of artist that would care enough about
optimizing profit on Spotify to actually change their music isn't the kind of
artist I give a shit about in the first place.

~~~
jere
I find it hard to believe Kendrick Lamar falls in that bucket and with that, I
can't take this article very seriously.

~~~
p1necone
Yeah I'd be much more inclined to believe it's just a desired stylistic change
from him. Or perhaps he knows about shorter songs being more profitable and
decided to do it _without_ sacrificing integrity. (Constraints do make
creativity more fun/easier sometimes).

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montalbano
Interesting hypothesis but it would certainly be strengthened by some input
from musicians targeting spotify listeners.

Who is to say shorter attention spans aren't part of the cause?

Another important missing bit of information - what percentage of the song
needs to be listened to for it to count as a full play? Is it 100%? That seems
to be what is implied by the article.

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woodandsteel
This is one reason I get my music from youtube, not spotify. The videos just
as long as the musicians want them to be. For instance
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzjvL6bRRKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzjvL6bRRKg)

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djs070
The tiny data points presented in the article do not justify the strongly
worded title

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y7
Misleading title. The article doesn't substantiate the claim and just points
out a coincidence. It even says so:

> Still, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how much streaming has contributed to
> the recent shortening of songs. The length of pop songs had already been
> falling through the 1990s, before accelerating in recent years. Some music
> industry observers blame shortening attention spans—but there isn’t much
> rigorous evidence that our ability to focus has changed (paywall). Others
> believe that shorter songs may be a result of more consumer choice—songs
> need to be more compact and catchy to stand out in the crowd.

Interesting that the last part of the url is "is-spotify-making-songs-
shorter". Maybe that was the original title and the editor wanted more
clickbait?

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pcstl
Nothing new, really. Do people generally believe most mainstream songs being
around 3 minutes in length is due to artistic choice?

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perfmode
Earl Sweatshirt’s new LP clocks in at 25 minutes; 15 songs.

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marcelr
He’s always had short albums

