"We're operating in an 'attention economy,' and attention is scarce and valuable." Your product isn't necessarily your song, it's your personal brand," Léveillé Gauvin said. "Artists and producers are shifting from having their songs as cultural products to having their songs as advertisements for themselves. Rather than looking for direct income on streaming services, artists are looking for something else -to drive listeners to their concerts or to other products they sell, he said. "If people can skip so easily and at no cost, you have to do something to grab their attention."
There's always another song," Léveillé Gauvin said. "It's survival-of-the-fittest: Songs that manage to grab and sustain listeners' attention get played and others get skipped. And that means that artists get to the musical point more quickly in the interest of grabbing a fickle listening audience, many of whom tune in on Spotify, Pandora and other skippable services. This evolution is likely driven by what Léveillé Gauvin calls the "attention economy" of modern-day pop. Another change he found: Song names today are shorter than they used to be - often just a single word. He also documented a marked increase in tempo.Īnd Léveillé Gauvin discovered that singers of the most recent successful songs hardly waste any time before mentioning the song title in the lyrics. Léveillé Gauvin spent a couple months listening to and analyzing songs that hit the top 10 from 1986 to 2015 and found a dramatic shift away from long intros. His study appears in the journal Musicae Scientiae. Intros that averaged more than 20 seconds in the mid-80s are now only about 5 seconds long, the study found.ĭepending on what rocks your musical world, the popularity of streaming services might be to thank or to curse for a move away from the instrumental intro, said Hubert Léveillé Gauvin, a doctoral student in music theory at The Ohio State University.
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