Billboard Top 100 Song Length Over Time
Music isn’t what it used to be. At least from a social standpoint.
I’ll date myself real quick. Back in the late 90s, you had the beginnings of what I’ll call personalized music. You could finally buy just ONE song through an MP3 file. MP3 players and iPods took over. Before this era, radio DJs were the gatekeepers of music. Everyone listened to the same thing. There was minimal selection, no way to really share music on the go, and the radio was how people discovered new sounds. It was communal. If a song was big, everyone knew it.
After the MP3 era, streaming took hold. It really started in the early 2010s and became the dominant format around 2015. Once you could stream any song, any time, it was over. No one really listened to the same stuff anymore. Or at least, the overlap got way smaller. Everyone had their own playlist, their own tastes, their own world of music that might never cross paths with someone else’s.
But recently, I’ve been thinking. Maybe short-form social media is starting to bring back that shared experience. Reels, TikToks, all those 10-second videos…they push a song into everyone’s feed, and suddenly the same sound is everywhere again. You hear it in the background of dance clips, memes, travel montages, everything. And I wonder if that’s why songs have gotten shorter since the 2010s. You only need that one catchy part. The hook. Something loopable. Something that works in 10 seconds. Because now, that’s how music spreads again.
For better or worse, we have more choice than ever with music, and it’s getting shorter. Personally, I love being able to listen to anything from heavy metal to folk to synthwave. But I really enjoy bonding with people over a song, especially one that’s not as well known. So it’s a mixed bag… but probably for the better.
So I decided to take matters into my own hands.
Let’s pull and webscrape the Weekly Billboard Top 100, going all the way back to 1958. Then feed those tracks into the Spotify API to get their durations. With a bit of R code and some quiet time while the kids napped, I built the resulting scatterplot.
There’s no doubt that song lengths have decreased since the rise of the internet and especially social media. But that spike in the late 60s? That likely lines up with the rise of 8-track tapes. While LPs had been around since 1948, 8-tracks were introduced in 1965 and gained massive popularity by the late 60s, especially in cars. Their continuous loop format and growing availability encouraged longer play times and more adventurous track sequencing. Around that same time, artists were also pushing creative boundaries, with genres like psychedelic rock and progressive rock embracing extended compositions. After that came cassette tapes, which brought more portability, and then CDs in the 90s, which pushed both storage capacity and sound quality even further.
But the internet changed the rules and short-form video might be rewriting them again.