Shorter songs, longer albums? How music has changed over the last 15 years

Annabelle Mayor
5 min readOct 12, 2023

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Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

What’s your favourite song from this year? Do you wish it was longer?

It’s a common frustration. With more and more songs clocking in at under 3 or even 2 minutes, some feel like they’re over just as they’re getting started. Meanwhile, album tracklists seem to be growing, especially in certain genres. Streaming is often pinned as the culprit. It’s how most of us consume music now, and its influence on charts and revenue makes it a likely influence on songwriting trends, too.

As this month marks 15 years since Spotify launched its platform, I decided to look at how song and album lengths have changed over its lifetime. I collected data from the year-end Billboard charts, mainly because the data was easy to find and verify and the US is the world’s largest music market. This gives us a snapshot of popular music between 2008–2022.

Full details of the data collection and analysis can be found in my Jupyter notebook here.

Shrinking songs

The Billboard Hot 100 chart combines a song’s sales, streams, and radio play to calculate the US’ most popular hits each week and at the end of each year. The chart began incorporating streaming data in 2007 starting with AOL Music and Yahoo! Music. US views for songs on YouTube were also added to the formula in 2013.

Taking the average length of the top 10 songs on the year-end Hot 100 charts, we see a significant downward trend.

From 4 minutes and 14 seconds in 2008 to 3 minutes and 8 seconds in 2022, popular songs have shortened by over a minute on average. These are single lengths too, not the often shorter radio edits. It’s also interesting to note the drop after 2017 — the year streaming became the music industry’s largest source of revenue.

The longest song that made it to the top 10 was Justin Timberlake’s Mirrors that was released in 2013. At 8 minutes and 4 seconds long, it’s no wonder it caused that year’s average to spike. Meanwhile, Lil Nas X’s 2021 hit Montero (Call Me By Your Name) was the shortest at 2 minutes and 17 seconds.

When it comes to the song lengths of album tracks, there’s a similar shortening trend.

This data was calculated from the top 10 bestselling albums from the Billboard 200 year-end charts. The chart ranks albums and EPs based on sales and streams. Unlike the Hot 100, streams weren’t incorporated until 2014.

The average song length on albums was 4 minutes and 10 seconds in 2008. In 2019, it hit a low of 3 minutes and 14 seconds, remaining around this mark until 2022 when it increased to 3 minutes and 41 seconds.

While it seems unlikely that singles will get longer anytime soon, it will be interesting to see if the average album track bucks the trend. However, shorter songs have their payoffs. On Spotify, artists are paid per stream as long as someone listens for 30 seconds. If a person listens to the entire track, more is paid out. Having a long album full of short songs means more revenue, provided people listen to the whole thing.

The whole thing

Looking at the top 10 albums from the Billboard 200 year-end charts again, we can see that average album runtime has fluctuated over the past 15 years.

Most last somewhere between 60 to 75 minutes long, but in 2014 and 2022 they broke the 80 minute mark.

2014’s sharp rise is down to an outlier floating high above the rest: Garth Brooks’ compilation album Blame It All on My Roots: Five Decades of Influences. It’s a hefty 77 tracks spread over 6 CDs (plus DVDs with video content and a photobook) totalling a runtime of 4 hours and 46 minutes. All for $24.96!

The average album tracklist has a slightly clearer upward trend, with albums remaining over 20 songs long for the last 3 years.

Taking out the outlier

As Brooks’ 2014 compilation skewed the averages for that year, let’s see how the charts look when we remove it.

Without the outlier, 2022 becomes the year when album runtimes had a notable increase while tracklists have a steadier growth trend over time.

Outro

Songs are getting shorter and albums are getting longer — at least in terms of track numbers. This change in commercial music is unsurprising given streaming platform payment models, charts, and listener habits. Album runtimes have been more varied, but it’ll be interesting to see where they go after last year’s significant increase. With the rate at which the music industry changes, who knows what new technology and trends will be making an impact in the near future.

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Annabelle Mayor
Annabelle Mayor

Written by Annabelle Mayor

My brain dumps, but structured! Profile photo made with @yasmini.gif's picrew.

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