Songs are too short
and the dopamine dilemma
Something has happened in the last few years with the popularity of TikTok and the “sound” function (Which I explained in a previous post). It’s probably true that users’ attention spans are affected by this website, and there’s information, scientific and anecdotal, to verify this. I accidentally watched a very large portion of Lilo & Stitch on the app the other day. Who is uploading ENTIRE movies split into 198 parts? And now it’s hitting the songs. I’m sure some executives in the music industry have a more well articulated explanation for this phenomenon, but I can’t take seriously the notion of making a song less than two minutes long. It could be genre specific, it could be TikTok specific. But I think that it’s a trend that many listeners of pop music are beginning to notice. And it’s starting to get personal now that it’s hit the music that I regularly listen to.
I think the final straw for me was the Barbie movie soundtrack. Not only has the movie been widely anticipated and subject to a cult-like following and a barrage of memes, but the star-studded soundtrack has gotten the attention of many. Charli XCX, Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice, Sam Smith, Dua Lipa, and many more have been featured. However,
A 1:26 Tame Impala song
A 2:02 Pinkpanthress song (To be fair, literally ALL of her songs are this short, if not shorter. That’s also my personal bone to pick with her, but WHATEVER!)
A 1:56 Charli XCX song
And of course the remix of Aqua’s Barbie Girl – Now done by Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj, A whopping 1:49.
I could give countless more examples. Thankfully, several articles have already noticed this phenomenon as early as 2016.
A Billboard article by Elias Leight points out that the average length of popular songs has been shrinking steadily for years and quotes an executive who says that it’s a reaction to the “culture of soundbites” that we’re currently experiencing. Another quote from this same billboard article is haunting me really badly. It’s where writer and producer Mitch Allan says, “There’s charm to a short song because the person hits repeat – play it again, play it again.” In a 2019 interview, Mark Ronson puts the phenomenon into perspective:
all your songs have to be under three minutes and 15 seconds because if people don’t listen to them all the way to the end they go into this ratio of ‘non-complete heard’, which sends your Spotify rating down” and songwriters are forced to churn out hits at short order.
Many of my longtime readers will observe that Spotify is always at the scene of the crime. Unsurprisingly, I must say that I’m not a very big fan of this idea. The “non-complete heard” and the “culture of soundbites” and the “play it again and again.” I saw something that perplexed me a bit on TikTok the other day. A trend, to no one’s surprise. Young people are doing something called a “Dopamine Detox.” This is where you try to stop your body from being “addicted” to the short bursts of dopamine that we get from scrolling on TikTok, or YouTube, or watching TV. I suspect that a major player in seeing a lot of younger women doing this online may come from this episode of Emma Chamberlain’s podcast. Don’t feel bad if you don’t know who that is — she’s an influencer/Youtuber with a very large following. Many videos detail steps wherein you stop using your social media entirely, stop watching tv and movies, and I’ve even seen a few that call for no music (except for instrumental or ambient which, side note, I take issue with, but whatever). The idea is to “reset” your brain so that you feel less dependent on scrolling and technology to feel happy and fulfilled during the day.
Is this substantiated in any actual science? I cannot say for sure. Certainly, most people could probably benefit from a bit less screen time or generally being more mindful of their consumption. I just find the whole thing to be deeply telling about where we are as a society and a culture where this is even necessary. Also the term “detox” I always find to be misleading because people tend to use it to describe weird diets or stuff that your liver and kidneys do for you automatically.
In my search for whether or not this idea of chasing dopamine had any basis in reality, I stumbled across a great video by Jesse Meadows on TikTok (and also on substack at https://sluggish.substack.com) that explains that the rhetoric of Dopamine being the reason for everyone being “addicted” to their phones and social media is actually (unsurprisingly) a myth. I would suggest reading Meadows’ entire post, but they tied it up quite succinctly in the short video that they made regarding the matter. It’s an issue that goes beyond just pop psychology trends and even gets traced back to the Protestant Work Ethic (Which… if you know, you know..) and Stanford University and even straight up Eugenics. It mythologizes the concept of self-optimization and places blame on the individual.
. . . so we do drugs and we binge Netflix and we play video games and we scroll on TikTok. That’s literally why these entertainment industries exist and make so much money. They are a cope. . . . I think what they’re calling “dopaminergic behaviors” have a lot less to do with pleasure seeking and more to do with coping with unpleasant social realities.
(Jesse Meadows via TikTok)
I also am interested to see where all of the conversation regarding places like TikTok and Instagram reels (which are just TikToks reposted to Instagram, sorry to all of my friends who think they are somehow more acceptable) goes in the next few years. As if Gen-z and Millenials weren’t already raised in the culture of screentime. Scary language regarding TV watching and playing video games is nothing new to us. Even Nickelodeon told us to “touch grass” when they blocked off hours for the “worldwide day of play.” Though I imagine the concern lies less within Generation-Z and Millenials and more with Gen Alpha, Gen-z’s confusing younger siblings who grew up with 24/7 screen and internet access unlike their predecessors. This is all with the caveat that I’m pretty sure that generation cohorts are all marketing designations anyway.
Additionally, there’s something that made me feel icky about reading “no listening to music” in these dopamine detox posts. At the same time, there’s also something sinister about the intentional shortening of songs so that you have to listen to them over and over again to…get that dopamine hit? I think it kind of reinforces some of the stereotypes that have existed throughout the history of popular music, where certain types or genres of music are considered to be more “addicting” or more “sinful” or literally bad for your health. Rock and Roll, R&B, Metal, Pop, Hip-hop and Rap, have been subjected to this rhetoric for years. And there’s often even a racial element to these criticisms, particularly towards genres created and dominated by Black artists.
The addendum “instrumental is ok” is even more wild to me. I know a lot of people who don’t know how to be normal about instrumental music - enter any school of music or conservatory in America. Watch how they fight each other over jazz arrangements and who conducted Beethoven 5 best between 1981 and 2003!
My hunch is that streaming isn’t helping either. This is a concept that even I struggle to get behind at times because it’s just so hyper-consumerist and maybe just conceptually bizarre. A really interesting case study that someone should do (someone else, not me. I don’t have the patience for this) is how the introduction of Kpop into American music media has changed things. In the late 2010’s, we started to see groups like BTS and Blackpink begin to appear in mainstream American music and media, and we now see it even more so within the last year or two. Fifty-Fifty’s song Cupid went so viral on Tiktok, that a “rookie” group that would have gone virtually unnoticed in South Korea, is now on the barbie soundtrack. Groups like Twice and Le Sserafim regularly have hugely popular trending songs on TikTok. BTS has been nominated for multiple Grammys. Blackpink’s Jennie was in The Idol. NewJeans, (under the same parent company as BTS and Le Sserafim) is becoming wildly popular on TikTok, and even with the general pop-enjoying public (which I suspect is thanks to the master songwriting of Erika de Casier but who said that..).
This is not to place sole blame on the culture of streaming on Korean Pop fans. There’s certainly fanbases in the US who are dedicated and behave in similar ways. I’m curious as to whether a lot of the practices from Kpop fandoms have become more commonplace in US pop fandoms, like the multiple versions of physical media and the multiple remixes of a single song.
I was curious about the new EP that Newjeans had dropped and checked out a few threads online to see what people were saying. People seem to like it, but then almost every comment complained about the song lengths. Curious, I went to see how long the EP was.
6 songs. 12 minutes and 13 seconds total.
For the whole EP.
We used to have ballads, unnecessarily long guitar solos, instrumental breaks, 12” versions of disco songs. And yeah, we still have all of those things and can go back and listen to them whenever we want. But I have to question the motivations for the shortening lengths. When artists make music, it seems that producers are now getting nitpicky about the lengths of songs and wondering how catchy the 1-2 minute portions are, how well they will work as a soundbite, cutting off entire portions of the work and shaping it to fit the narrative that gen-z simply wants a replayable bop for their sad little dopamine-deprived brains.
But there’s a lot of reasons why songs are short right now. Historically, it’s not a new occurrence. We’ve seen periods of time where songs were just as short throughout the 20th century.
We Will Rock You by Queen: 2:02
Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival: 2:20
La Bamba by Ritchie Valens: 2:06
Never Going Back Again by Fleetwood Mac: 2:14
So it’s likely an oversimplification to say that it’s just TikTok and our shortened attention spans that are the sole culprit.
We could also go with the structuralist argument that the songs are shortening for economic reasons. Recession-core implies that things like the lengths of skirts and shrinkflation are telltale signs of economic downturn. This is fun to think about, but I would also debunk this since songs have been shortening prior to the popularity of TikTok. Plus, the skirts are getting shorter and not longer which the hemline index implies that the economy is doing well?
I would also say that it’s not fair to make the assessment that repetition culture or the chasing of dopamine is a new concept. I remember sitting in the gym at summer camp in 5th grade with my friend as we pressed our ears to her new motorola razr, where she was allowed to download ringtones (astonishing, considering most people would just wait for their song to come on the radio so they could record it) and listened to the same nightcore remixes of Bleeding Love by Leona Lewis and Kiss Me Thru The Phone by Soulja Boy over and over and over and over.
By the way, did you know that back in the day (2008… another recession!) when you called the number in Kiss Me Thru The Phone (678-999-8212) a pre-recorded message by Soulja Boy would play?
Look. It’s been a rough year. Or two years. Or five years. But for my own mental health, I need everybody to make these songs longer. We can’t keep having Lana Del Rey being the only person doing the legwork for songs that are really long!
Thanks for reading!
Things I’m Into That Nobody Asked About:
Kollage by Carly Rae Jepsen — Please stop sleeping on her I am so serious
Deli by Ice Spice
New Hozier Album — So sad that I almost cried at the breakfast table
New Mitski — I’m a lot less depressed these days so the first single didn’t resonate with me as much, but Heaven and Star are so good!
Little Bit by Erika de Casier — I love her lately, her music has kind of a 90’s r&b flare a la Brandy
Cowboy Take Me Away by The Chicks — This is such a phenomenal song from a phenomenal album. Even if you don’t “like” Country music, It’s just so so good
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver — Don’t let the length intimidate you, this is a really great book that paints a stunning picture of life in Appalachia and identity in general.
Tiktoks:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8FpYbqt/
A guide to Lilith Fair, which I wish still existed!
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8FpFve9/
Some fun facts about one of my favorite artists, Caroline Polachek
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8FpFsN3/
A video that asks “What Genre Is Newjeans?”
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8FpkwJq/
An opera singer gives a helpful guide on how to attend an opera performance today