Popular Music Trends

[Brent Hahn]

Originally Posted by frankmcr

One of the things Beato points out is that many great songs of the late 60s/early 70s were less than 3 minutes. Masterpieces like "In My Life".

I play a lot at "curated" singer-songwriter events, house concerts and such, and study this when the other performers are up there. The audience is usually hitting the mental "next" button before the performer is even halfway through a song. For various reasons. Also, I play bass in a trio with a very traditional "tuning-and-explaining" folk singer. It's a paying gig and he's really good, but he's always surprised that he makes a 13-song set list and we only manage to do 8. And he's not much interested in having the conversation about why that is.

[KevWind]

Short attention spans not withstanding



there is this observation

[Cecil6243]

Originally Posted by FrankHudson

Yes. The highlight of Beato's video was pointing that out. Myself? my Parlando Project deals with literary poetry. That Project believes one can make an effective statement in a compressed form. The length differences between a poem and novel or full-length play are greater than anything we experience in musical forms!

A lot of the Short Attention Span stuff out there isn't looking for intense attention that some poems invite/need however. Short-form social media is largely about the ongoing scrolling time-line and the brief flash of entertainment before moving on to the next.

Beyond that, there's a thing I worry about the culture missing: that it may take a minimum length of musical expression to achieve certain effects. There are things that you likely can't elicit with a sub-3-minute composition. I am talking about "instrumental" music, or music with long instrumental passages in that regard.

I have done some professional writing as in a newspaper column, magazine articles etc. and one thing that is well known in the industry with any writing is you can always shorten the length and increase the quality. So perhaps it's true with music too?

[Cecil6243]

Originally Posted by KevWind

Short attention spans not withstanding



there is this observation

Yes!

[gmr]

I’m not a working musician, just a music lover. I am glad to see a trend back toward the side of shorter songs. It seemed like most songs back in my youth were somewhere between two to four minutes. A four minute song seemed long back then.
Long intros, too many short phrases repeating over and over, an outro (is that a word?), too often doesn’t contribute much of anything to a song for me personally.
But there are definitely well conceived long songs, I think.
Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a brilliantly crafted tale of nearly six minutes.
Country today seems to follow more of a pop type format, albeit with more guitar and overt twang. Maybe the growth of the Country genre has a lot to do with more guitar, less piano??