Songs are getting shorter now.

[FreshAIG]

Been going on for years. It's the attention span of the audience. There's so much content you're competing with now, not just music. Kids ain't listening to a 4 minute rap song in 2022.

 

[JoelB]

I be on the block
Ugh
I be on the block
Ugh
I be on the block
Ugh
Selling all the rock
Yeah
Selling all the rock
Yeah
Looking out cops
Shooting at my ops

read this in Carti voice

 

[King Poetic]

Typical song in 5 years

Beat comes in for 20 seconds

Rap lyric comes in saying “I’m the illest nikka in the streets and the only nikka to drop my opps with out the heat “ for 10 seconds

Outro beat for 30 seconds

 

[Unknown Poster]

attention spans are way shorter than they used to be.

This is it right here.
Seems most people's attention spans are 2 minutes long now.

 

[Jesus H. Christ]

Some of those songs be even shorter. Because for some weird reason these cats love to repeat what they said a lot

I be on the block
Ugh
I be on the block
Ugh
I be on the block
Ugh
Selling all the rock
Yeah
Selling all the rock
Yeah
Looking out cops
Shooting at my ops

Hook

Song ends

read this in Carti voice

This a banger frfr

 

[JoelB]

This a banger frfr

wooooooo that shyt hard
Perfect length too so it forces me to replay 50x in a row

 

[FunkDoc1112]

yeah i been noticing this heavy- part of it is attention span, adjusting for streams playback and artists not being creative enough. but then i look at back older albums, some of them were longer and just a lot of songs not fully interesting. i think making a short concise well thought out album is the move. 10-12 songs, well written, somewhere from 30-45 minutes- is not bad.

a lot of albums like that i walk or workout to them. as long as its quality its all good. that game album and donda got too many joints i gotta be in the mindset to play them. i ran that donda and it was just too long and i seen the tracklist for game- that crazy. i still aint listened to game yet, i will eventually though.

these past few albums from nas, cole etc been good time limits to me. 30-40 mins enough to rock out and run it back if you want, and still get quality from it

When CD became the main format, a lot of artists definitely went nuts and started making those super long albums. Rap was always kind of unusual with with the 16+ song albums with 4 minute songs and shyt.

I've said this before but streaming has made the musical landscape a little bit more similar to how it was in the 60s and 70s, where artists would make shorter albums and drop more frequent releases.

 

[Deltron]

i like long songs

 

[Danie84]

These wrappers wouldn't even make the cuttting room floor in the 3 Verses/Hook era

 

[O.Red]

BECAUSE LYRICS WERE STILL
ELEMENTARY IN THOSE DAYS...

ITS CALLED EVOLUTION...

THE FACT THAT WE'RE REVERTING
BACK TO THAT AKA DEVOLVING
SPEAKS VOLUMES ABOUT THE STATE
OF THIS GENERATION.



​

Song length is not an inherent indicator of song quality. There are masterpieces that barely cross 2 minutes and there are 4-5 minute pieces of bloated garbage

And if we're being honest a lot of songs from the 90s and early 2000s haven't aged well because they're bloated as hell. No one wants to admit it but it's been a relief to a lot of people that songs don't have to be 3 gatdamn verses with a bridge and 3 choruses and shytplenty of songs have worn out their welcome being too long

There is a place for longer songs like anything else in music, but that shyt ain't for everybody and a lot of artists are better for not trying to make a 5 minute song full of filler

 

[Solomon Lurke]

I’m sure there are plenty of people like me who at one point and time tried to rap back in the day. My biggest problem was I couldn’t ever really think of more than one verse and a hook when trying to write a song. So I’m jealous of this era. If I could have gotten away with 1:40 seconds a song I would have been lit.

Spoiler

Honestly I probably would have still been trash …

 

[O.Red]

Smart dumb oldheads sounding just like your parents and grandparents

Song length has usually always been correlated with technology

The reason why songs used to be 3-4 minutes in the first place was because that's all how much could fit in a vinyl. And radios preferred that length so they could play it.

Nowadays, streaming and tiktok is the wave, so labels followed suit.

Them days where nikkas had 20 track albums with 15 4-5 minute songs and 5 wack ass skits

 

[BK The Great]

People ain't with listening to full body projects anymore, they rather listen to a short song with no substance.

 

[KidJSoul]

Them days where nikkas had 20 track albums with 15 4-5 minute songs and 5 wack ass skits

Exactly

 

[CrimsonTider]

yeah i been noticing this heavy- part of it is attention span, adjusting for streams playback and artists not being creative enough. but then i look at back older albums, some of them were longer and just a lot of songs not fully interesting. i think making a short concise well thought out album is the move. 10-12 songs, well written, somewhere from 30-45 minutes- is not bad.

a lot of albums like that i walk or workout to them. as long as its quality its all good. that game album and donda got too many joints i gotta be in the mindset to play them. i ran that donda and it was just too long and i seen the tracklist for game- that crazy. i still aint listened to game yet, i will eventually though.

these past few albums from nas, cole etc been good time limits to me. 30-40 mins enough to rock out and run it back if you want, and still get quality from it

Any artist dropping an album longer than 1 hour is playing themselves