Don't Bore Us, Get to the Chorus 🎶

Today's letter talks about the science behind 'Paying Attention' and how streaming rules now mean that songs are getting shorter, and choruses are introduced quicker.

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What’s good everyone?

As part of a weekly segment where I cover my favorite learnings and anecdotes from Will Page’s book Tarzan Economics, today I talk about a snippet of his second chapter called ‘Paying Attention’

In what he considers one of his 8 principles for helping businesses pivot through disruption, ‘Paying Attention’ talks about how every media company today is in the business of grabbing a slice of its user’s attention, regardless of how good its product and marketing are.

Page quotes the Co-founder and CEO of Netflix: Reed Hastings, who famously said that sleep is the biggest competitor of Netflix:

“You get a show or a movie you're really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep”

The fact that Netflix is able to churn out binge-worthy shows every month, clearly it is working.

On the same note of attention, Page goes on to talk about how the same is now trickling into Music, wherein we see songs getting shorter by the day.

Talking about the first time he observed this, Page recollects 👇🏻

“As streaming took off in Sweden, two things started to happen: songs got shorter and the chorus got moved to the front. I first noticed this when I entered Spotify's Stockholm reception back in 2012. Playing in the background was the music of Avicii (Tim Bergling), which had me hooked from the opening note”

“There was a serious buzz about Avicii inside Spotify; a hometown hero, the hope was that if either Spotify or Avicii exploded, the other would fall into the 'slipstream' and explode with it. Avicii's songs were catchy as hell, grabbing listeners from the outset with the chorus and never letting go.

I wasn't used to being hooked so quickly.”

Avicci and EDM’s rise has been synonymous with Spotify’s global domination.

Comparing the same with Rock music icon- Bon Jovi's 1986 anthem 'Livin' on a Prayer': a 4-minute-and-9-second classic anthem, Page explains that the reason its chorus works so well can be found in a key change at 3 minutes 23 seconds into the song, something referred to as modulation of a song.

Can you imagine a Pop song with a chorus at 3:23 minutes now?

Most of them are done and dusted by then!

But where’s the proof of it?

Dan Kopf- a Data Editor at Quartz magazine, points out in a blog post that from 2013 to 2018 the average song on the Billboard Hot 100 fell from 3 minutes and 50 seconds to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds.

6 % of hit songs were 2 minutes 30 seconds or shorter in 2018.

For instance, check out Drake’s last 3 albums: with the width of the blocks being proportional to the duration of the song.

Visibly, his albums are getting longer, but each individual song is getting shorter 👇🏻

Choruses are starting sooner, too.

A study by The Economist and Billboard magazine reveals that in the past, the number of hits with a chorus that began in the first 15 seconds would be between 10-20%.

In 2010, that spiked to 40% and shows little sign of subsiding.

For example, Canadian Pop Star Shawn Mendes's 2019 hit single 'Señorita, gets you to the chorus within the first 15 seconds and is a fixture throughout the song's 3 minutes and 10 seconds.

So what has changed exactly?

Page explains this in the book by talking about ‘Attention Economics’

Back in the 80s, Soundlounge CEO Ruth Simmons helped pioneer the use of music in TV commercials.

She looks at children today to understand the attention spans of tomorrow, and has identified 3 stages in marketing to a child's attention:

👉🏻 Promise (5 seconds)

👉🏻 Anticipation (15-20 seconds)

👉🏻 Commitment ( > 30 seconds)

What does this mean? 🤔

Any seller/advertiser has, at most, 30 seconds to make a promise, create anticipation and secure a commitment before the listener moves on.

The logic is that a song frames a melody, and when a listener hears it repeatedly in a chorus, the brain releases endorphins.

Now couple this with Spotify’s rule, which only pays an artist if their song is streamed by the listener beyond 30 seconds.

In such a scenario, the artist would want to engage the listener enough in the first 30 seconds itself, to make sure they go beyond that mark right?

While music purists may argue that this is a case of the ‘Tail wagging the Dog’, meaning that the rules of the music business are influencing how the actual song is made, and not the other way round, the point is that it is the reality we live in.

Streaming has not just changed music consumption patterns, but music in itself, and whether you are for it or against it, the consensus says just one thing:

“Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus”