Switched on Pop - How Streaming Changed the Sound of Pop

Episode Date: March 12, 2019

Streaming hasn't just changed the way we listen to music, it's changed the way that pop music sounds. After years of losses due to the death of the CD and the rise of file sharing, the music industry has finally found a profitable business in streaming services. Streaming has overtaken all other music sales. Digital music platforms are the new Virgin megastore. But these services are more than just a distribution mechanism, they have created a whole new music economy. Album sales have been replaced by "album equivalent units," a business fiction that equates 1,500 streams to one physical sale. Artists are now effectively paid by the song. With ad-supported and subscription based business models, these platforms have upended incentives so significantly that it can be heard in the songwriting. Songs are getting shorter, albums are getting longer, and there is an entirely new section of the song that draws from the classical past: the "pop overture." In this episode, Nate and Charlie are joined by Aisha Hassan and Dan Kopf to unpack the sound of pop in the streaming era. Be sure to check out their article on Quartz: "The Reason Why Your Favorite Pop Songs Are Getting Shorter." Songs FeaturedLil Pump - I Love ItBenny Blanco - Eastside ft. Khalid & HalseyKodak Black - Calling My SpiritPost Malone - Better NowLeonard Bernstein - West Side Story OvertureDua Lipa - One KissDrake - God’s PlanPost Malone - I Fall ApartAriana Grande - NasaTommy Dorsey - All The Things You Are Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app.

Download the Eater. app at eater app.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So Nate, have you noticed this anxiety that has overtaken pop music in the last six months? Which one? I feel like pop is full of anxiety. So according to many, the economics of streaming is changing music so significantly right now that pop may literally never sound the same again. And today I want to investigate these claims by seeing how musicians are altering their sounds to make it in today's streaming economy. And to do this, I've recruited Aisha Hassan and Dan Kopp, who have written about how streaming

is affecting the sound of pop for quarts in a piece called The Reason Why Your Favorite Pop Songs are getting shorter. Aisha and Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks. Nice to be here. This is exciting. Yes. It is.

Okay. So in the recent Guardian interview, Mega Pop producer Mark Ronson said that 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 get into this ratio of non-complete herd, which sends your Spotify rating down and songwriters are forced to churn out hits at short order. So, Aisha, can you untangle Ronson's gripe and explain what is causing so much concern? So the way that many music streaming services work is that songs generate money per play. That means every time that they're streamed, they generate a certain amount of money. and that's very little. So it ranges between $0.004 to $0.008.

And then if you don't play it to the very end, and that rating goes down, meaning that people don't listen to the song through as much, then the song is less likely to make it into Spotify's really lucrative playlist, which get them streamed more. And because the amount of money is so little, volume is really important. So this is obviously extremely different

from how artists were paid in the past. Right. I think it's important to note that artists right now, according to a report in 2017, they're only getting about 10% of the music industry's total revenue. But streaming is so important because that's how they're going to break out, right? And if they're not going to be heard by audiences, then less people are going to buy their tickets for their concerts, less people are going to buy their merch. So to be visible, it's really important to sometimes game the streaming system, so more people listen to their stuff.

Okay, gaming the streaming system. Yeah. So there's some sort of perverse incentives going on here. And just to sort of get a sort of order of magnitude around this, a CD used to cost, you know, $15 to $20. And how many songs do you have to stream in order to make the equivalent on an old record? So a thousand streams is equivalent of $6. So we're talking about 1,500 streams to get $9. Well, and of course, and the artist probably is only making a fraction of that.

those $9. That's exactly right. The music services tend to take 30% of that revenue. So Spotify or Apple Music or whatever will take around 30%. And then even though you've got the rest of that money going to artists, depending on the deal that they have of record labels and the amount of people who have contributed to the track, that money, which is already very little at the beginning, is split up even more. So artists are actually getting a very, very small amount of money. Okay, so this is interesting. I feel like we have two different issues at hand now that we have to deal with. One, as you mentioned, is this question of, are songs getting shorter and sort of why? And then also are there certain time markers or boundaries that you have to fit within? Is that changing the way that perhaps people are writing music? And so let's take them in that order. Great. So are songs getting shorter?

Yes, definitely. So around 2000, the median length of a Billboard Hot 100 songs was well over four minutes, so about four minutes and seven seconds. And in 2018, it was just over three and a half minutes. So we've lopped off more than 30 seconds off the average Billboard Hot 100 songs. So that's quite a bit. Oh, fascinating. So Mark Ronson's anxiety that Charlie quoted at the beginning of this episode is perhaps warranted.

songs are getting shorter. Yes. And there's also these extreme examples. So there are a bunch of songs now that are under two and a half minutes long. So in the 2000s, there were virtually no songs under two and a half minutes that made the charts. And in 2018, about 6% of them were less than two and a half minutes and some even just two minutes. Yeah, you documented this in your piece and there's like a hockey stick like graph basically starting in, I don't know, like 20. In 2015, all of a sudden there's all of these songs that are now two and a half minutes or shorter.

You pointed to Kanye West and Lil Pumps. I love it, which comes in at just over two minutes. Wow. Correct. So the question, of course, is like, where is the music going? I'm curious in your investigations, how much of this do you see is intertwined with the dominance of hip hop as the main form of today's popular music? So that's a complicated thing to answer because hip-hop has seeped into all genres. So even when you listen to country, as you guys have pointed out in previous shows, country now has a hip-hop effect.

But if you look at every genre, they've all fallen. R&B, rock, pop, country, all of them have taken a big dive over the last two decades. Rap the most, so it's definitely the biggest phenomenon there. But it's not just a hip-hop thing. So on the one hand, we have some different incentive structures set up. And just to be clear about them, my understanding is we have songs are getting shorter because the way that you get paid with streaming is per song. And it used to be since the, I don't know, the age of album-oriented music, that the album

was the main way that you made your money. And so now if you're getting paid per song, it makes sense to have like 20 really short songs that might actually run shorter than an album length that would be 10 songs that are twice, three times as long. And so your gaming can I get as many songs in as possible? Is that an accurate description of how some people are understanding this? Yeah. I just want to complicate things a little bit.

So, yes, we are pretty confident that streaming matters, but this is actually a pretty long-term trend. So if we look over the 20th century, you'll see that songs were quite short in the 40s and 50s, and then they got way longer through the latter half of the 20th century. And then starting around the late 1990s, all the way up to today, we see songs shortening. So it's definitely got to be more than just streaming. But we're confident that sort of the effect that we're seeing over the last several years is a result of the desire to make more money from having shorter songs. And if somebody listens to an album repetitively, the artist will get more money.

But there's definitely more going on there than just streaming. Okay. So Spotify actually put out a press release about this phenomenon and said that in the world of digital consumption, our narrow windows of free time are the object of fierce competition by the seemingly limitless choices streaming platforms present. Short songs represent a solution to an audience's abundance of choice alongside endless opportunities for diversion. So there's sort of a question of like, our audience is also driving this, but perhaps that's what they're suggesting. I think what we need to do, though, is examine the music and see, is this really going on? And I'm particularly interested in looking at, like, if songs are getting shorter, what's being put on the chopping block? And so we established that hip hop is the most dominant form of pop music right now.

You go on the billboard, 60, 70% of the charts are going to be hip hop. And if you also look at the songs, which tend to be shorter, especially these sort of two-minute, two-and-a-half-minute songs, a lot of hip-hop songs in there as well. And I think there's a part of this which makes sense because in hip-hop you don't necessarily have as rigid a structure of a pop song. You don't necessarily have to have, for example, a pre-chorus or a post-chorus or a bridge. You can just have hook, verse, hook, verse, and you're out. And so when you look at a song like Kanye West and Lil' Pum's piece, they're doing exactly that. When the first time they ask you, you want sparkling or steel, are you trying to act like you drinking sparkling water for you came out here? You're such a

I'm a sick folk I like a quick folk I'm a sick folk Let's do a two verse piece Instead of You know you go back to 90s hip hop You might have had three, four, five verses in a song

So it's easy to just You can chop it down Make more songs That makes sense to me I think where things get more complicated Are when songs are using sort of more traditional verse chorus song form

So if we look at a song like East Side That song comes in at two minutes and 54 seconds Which is a pretty short pop song And I wanted to look at just Where is the extra music going? So let's take a listen to Benny Blanco's east side, and we're going to listen to just what happens at the end. Cool.

He used to meet me on the east side. She used to meet me on ice side. Okay. What did we just hear? That, I don't know. An outro? Outro. An outro.

Yes, I got it. I got it. It's an outro. But here's the thing. The material that was leading before that outro was the bridge of the song. And there's like a pretty hard and fast rule, Nate, professor, what happens after a bridge? You go back to the chorus. You go back to the chorus.

And so what they've actually done is they've just lopped off the final chorus, instead replaced it with an outro, which is the same material as the chorus. But you don't have that sort of big final bombastic moment. Instead, it's this sort of fading out moment. It's maybe appropriate for the song since this is a melancholy looking back on relationship song. But I think we're missing the final 30 seconds of the song because they literally just don't have the final two choruses. Yeah, it's like a bridge that just like goes directly into the ocean. It's a bridge to nowhere. So that's one sort of victim of the perhaps streaming driven shortening of pop songs that they're getting a chorus that you might expect to hear at the end is getting chopped off.

That's right. And replaced by just a little outro. Okay, so I found some other things that I think are ways that artists are, adapting to make things a little thinner, a little trim. I was talking to Jeremy Lloyd of Marion Hill, who was on our show a few episodes back, and really thoughtful about composition. And one of the things he said to us was the biggest thing I've been thinking about is skip rates to try to get people through the whole song. You all established that if you don't listen to 30 seconds of a song, people, it doesn't count, right? That's correct. People, if they're skipping

around, it's not counting. And so how can artists game a way to hook you into the song immediately? Well, probably the most obvious thing is don't have a minute long intro. And so one sort of adaptation that I've seen is a just jump right in on the song, almost like starting the song in the middle. And so here's a clip of Kodak Blacks calling my spirit and just check it out. it might actually make you jump. I put my heart on my lips. I gave it all I could give. I made it hot at the crib.

I kept in fire at the crib. Where you're going to go when you do? I just want to be clear. This was not me cutting into the song. The song literally just starts right here. I put my heart on my lips. I gave it all I could give. Huh.

Interesting. How really dropped like in Medius res. Like I'm just in the middle of everything going on. Don't you feel like you've like stepped in on someone's conversation? You're like, I'm so sorry. Exactly. I kind of loved it, though. I was bouncing right from the moment it started.

Dida. Did it. It's very effective. That is the point. And the other adaptation that I've seen songwriters make is an old adage, summarized by Dave Grohl so beautifully, talking with Kyle Grass from Tenacious D. You know who writes the hits? Aerosmith writes the hits.

The song is all court. Love in an elevator? What's the verse to that song? There is it one. It's loving an elevator. Janie's got a gun? It's all it. Well, how's it start?

Janie's got it. Right, so it's chorus, chorus, pre-chorus, chorus, chorus verse kind of. Chorus, pre-chorus, chorus, chorus, finale, chorus. It's all chorus. Don't Boris get to the chorus. Don't Boris. Get to the chorus. Hit lessons.

Wow, Dave Grohl, musicologist. I like it. So I have observed that many people are taking Dave Grohl's advice, don't Boris get to the chorus. And rather than having a traditional intro into a verse, to a pre-chorus and a chorus, we're just starting right in the chorus. The king of this method is Post Malone. You could look at his songs Better Now. Rockstar, Psycho, Congratulations.

They all do this. Let's just listen to Better Now, for instance. Think that you are better now, better now. You only say that because I'm not around. The man to let you get you. That is the chorus. And it works. It hooks you right in immediately.

Yeah. Yeah. And you're waiting for the next time it comes around. So you're more likely to stay now that you've got the Like the best bit of the song almost. Exactly. And you, so can I get that one again? I'm going to keep listening.

Get through that 30 second mark. Can I ask you a question, Charlie? Why didn't they always do this if it's so effective? Because maybe a pop song wants to have some romance and it wants to slowly seduce you and eventually lead you to that wonderful moment in the chorus. But now people are like, I want that dopamine hit right away. There's so many alternatives at all times, according to Spotify, right? So I'm witnessing these.

adaptations all over the billboard, but the one that interests me the most is something that actually harkens to the past. And in order to uncover the most creative, adaptive strategy for making music in the streaming era, I'm going to have to pass to Dr. Nate Sloan to take us back into the classical past. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new one. podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving

greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday.

We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminals. aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. they don't like the idea of having no idea

who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. That's my cue. So we're going to talk about something we're calling the pop overture. And the second half of that phrase,

the overture is like the classical part of this conversation because overtures go back to the world of opera, if you think of like, you know, a Rossini opera like William Tell, you know, that starts with just an instrumental overture, including the famous theme. But those overtures are not exactly what we're talking about because those overtures don't really feature, like, music from the opera that you're going to see. What's the point of them? What are they doing?

Just to, I mean, those are really to just engage the audience and to get them pumped up for the show that they're about to see. That's pretty much it. It's like going to a stadium and they play, you know. We will rock you. Exactly. But then we're more interested in what you might call like the Broadway overture, because this is an approach to writing an overture where you do the same thing. You get the audience excited. You get them jazzed up.

But you do it by taking all this music from the show they're about to. to see and putting it into like a compact little medley. You can take the example of a show like West Side Story. You know, that multi-hour musical gets condensed down into like a five-minute medley. We can play just a few excerpts from it right now. So we go from the song Tonight, Tonight to Maria, Maria, and then to the climactic. It's called Mambo, but it's like the big fight scene in the rumble scene kind of. So you're getting like all the material from the show you're about to see and it's kind of getting you excited, amping you up for the spectacle that you're about to behold.

It's spoiler alert. Yeah, in a way, I guess. It is, yeah. That's the classical pass. And I'm hearing basically artists taking this classical idea of the overture, probably not intentionally. But with the same effect, trying to get you excited for what's to come right away, right when you sit down on your seat. or wherever you are listening in your car, song comes on and you're in it. And the way that they're doing that is they're taking a fragment

of the most exciting part of the song, the chorus, and they're putting it into the beginning of the song. And there's a couple of different ways that I've heard people try this pop overture. Let's start with Duolipa. Her song, One Kiss, begins with a pop overture. We can hear how that intro comes again later. Here's the chorus in full.

And so you get the full version. Here what she's done is she's sort of applied a filter effect at the intro and given you just a small section of the chorus, not the whole thing, a little fragment of it. Now, the next artist that I hear doing this is Drake. We're going to talk more about Drake because Drake is really important in the streaming economy. On his song, God's plan, we are getting that same sort of fragment approach. Maybe even a smaller amount of the chorus. They wish and I wish and they wish and they wish on me. That's the intro.

Simple, not much. Just to remind everyone, if you haven't heard it, I think it's been streamed two billion times, but here it is. Bad things. It's a lot of bad things that they wish and wishing and wish and they wish and they wish and they wish on me. A little fragment of the chorus at the very beginning. I have one more clip that I want to play you all. which is Ariana Grande.

And she takes this to the extreme. She's going to take the pop overture, take that little chorus bit in the intro, and obfuscate it so that you don't even know what you're hearing until you hear it later. This is her song, NASA. So we just get a four count of this kind of strange synthesizer in the background, right?

Yeah. But check out what happens in the chorus. Hey, what do you think we're hearing? Okay, so I think you're saying that the pop, that synthesized line, we hear what we're calling the pop overjure at the beginning. The song is the same melody that she's singing later when the chorus comes in. I think it is.

That sounds like it to me. I agree it's the melody. I'm not sure if it's not actually a sample of her voice that has been distorted and filtered. Check it out one more time. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a good hypothesis, Chuck. It's introductory material that you have no idea is particularly important.

Like even her song, break free with Zed, begins with some really wild and interesting synthesizers that don't come back again until much later into the outro. They don't really have a relationship to the rest of the song. And that's a lot uncommon. Sometimes introductory and outro material is something unique to bring you in and take you out of the song. And here, this is like, I'm going to give you the prize at the end, but it's just a hint of it. Like, maybe you're seeing it from afar. So is the idea kind of like, if you're listening to a playlist that you, get the song, like a taste of the song in the very beginning, and then you can just immediately

decide, oh, I'm going to stick with this long enough to, you know, get that 30 seconds payout. Or if it's not, or you're like, oh, no, I didn't like that little, that three second intro, so I'm going to skip to the next one. That's what I'm thinking. I find it persuasive. What do you all think? Yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting reminder of what you're going to get. So you might stick with the song a bit longer. You get the juices flowing right away in a way that you're sort of not suspecting, and then the full thing comes on later. Yeah, I like this idea of foreshadowing almost is what it seems like to me. And you're just sort of getting a little taste, and it's the way it is in books, right? You see something, you're like, ooh, I like that. And then later you're like, oh, my God,

that's what it was. I like even more. To your point, I'm actually starting to listen differently now. Because, like, I don't know, I feel like so often introductory material, it feels more throwaway in a lot of popular music. Or, like, it has at least my relationship to it has been as such. And now I'm like, what is that thing you just did? Is that going to come back later? The recycling approach. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So one of the concerns that Mark Bronson brings up is this question of, like, is the streaming economy incentives fundamentally changing how music is written? And I think there's an important inverse of that question is the way that music is, is the way that music is, written actually just making shorter songs. It's hard to know which variable is accounting for this effect. And in your article, you talked about the rise of beat making culture as a way of producing music that may also be contributing to this. What is beat making culture? So, beat making culture is basically when you, you know, you make a funky beat and then you license that out to other artists or producers and they can sample it. And this is from Jeff Ponchick from repost when I spoke to him, and that's a platform that sort of connects artists

to streaming platforms. And the idea is once you get a really good beat and you find that it's lucrative and it's successful, that the greatest incentive is just to license it out and then create another one. So it's kind of like you're producing as quick as possible because you know that this beat is good, so you want to make the next one as quickly as possible. So it's kind of like an assembly line approach to pop production. or something. In a way, and obviously, streaming incentives have sort of heightened the tension between, you know, artistic integrity and creating beats that are optimal for streaming.

But I do think there is more incentive to create things quicker. And I think Mark Ronson touched on that too. He talked about how people just write songs in 30 minutes. And in that Guardian interview who said, well, it sounds like you wrote it in 30 minutes. But often with beats, I don't think. that's necessarily as obvious in comparison to lyrics. I think this gets to the important idea that it's beats mostly that they're making, rather than writing more songs that include bridges and multiple melodies and things like that.

And so I think when you have songs that are based on just this one particular beat, it doesn't make sense for those songs to be quite as long if there's not as much variation. Especially if people are having fun listening to them. Why extend them? if it's working. I think this raises a really important question, and sort of to get to the underlying anxiety is, I think, Aisha, you mentioned artistic integrity.

And this is very real. I think people are concerned, are there bad players out there? Is there fraud? Are people cheating this new system? There are people who have been trying to cheat the streaming system, as you say. So one sort of high-profile case was this band called Valpec. Yeah. And what they did was that they created this silent.

album. And they encouraged their fans to sort of play this album on repeat as they slept over and over again. I believe it was called Sleepify. Exactly, Sleepify. And then they said to their fans that the money generated from those streams would be used to fund their next tour. So in a way, you know, I don't know if the impetus behind that was sinister or not, but either way they were totally cheating the system. Yeah, there's another scam in Bulgaria that was not, you know, I don't think there were any good reasons for it, like the Wolf Beck one. They made about $1 million. This people in Bulgaria who just created fake Spotify accounts and played a third-party playlist over and over and over. And yeah, a million dollars out of it. Pretty good. Wow. Wow.

Yeah, just to jump in on that, that's sort of on the production side or the artist side. There have also been cases where fans have been cheating the system, right? And I think the most high profile of these cases is Harry Stiles and then BTS fans and for those who don't know BTS which is short for the Bangtan Boys is this really popular K-pop group and their fans sort of systematically bought US

premium accounts and distributed those login details all across the world and convinced other fans to sort of stream over and over and over again they even use VPNs to like sort of trick the servers and that made it seem like you know

the songs were skyrocketing to the top of the charts and now it's really hard to know what was fraud and what was real. Yeah, you don't want to mess with the army. That's the name of the BTS fans. Yes, the BTS army. That's wild. I unlike Mark Ronson, though, I definitely empathize as a fellow neurotic Jew in general about his, his, you know, anxieties about the state of the world. This particular thing, how streaming is changing the sound of music, doesn't keep me up at night. because I think as we've talked about, this is maybe part of a cyclical aspect of the music industry, right? You know, albums have not been around that long.

They're a relatively new phenomenon. They've only been around since the 60s. 1948 was the LP. Oh, no, no, Charlie, but that wasn't an album. The LP, this is really interesting. So the LP was invented in 1948, but album-oriented music only took off in the late 60s when people sort of finally took advantage of that extra length. Similarly, Spotify came out in 2006, sort of the most dominant streaming platform.

And now we're talking, you know, 14 years later, 13 years later, people are now responding to this new medium. And there's sort of this lag time between these new technologies gaining dominance within the industry. Yeah, I see what you mean. But to your point, yeah, things have always fluctuated. I mean, for example, Dan, you were mentioning earlier that songs used to be a lot shorter. When I saw all of these concerns about song lengths, I went to absurd lengths to build a database of all the number one songs since they've been documented, I think, since 1937 was the earliest I could go back. And songs used to be about three minutes long back in the 30s and 40s, but half of that song was often an instrumental. So if you took a song like All the Things You Are by Tommy Dorsey, the 1940 recording.

of springtime that makes the lonely winter. There is just one minute and six seconds of lyrics in a three minute and 19 second song. The rest is instrumental that basically does the same melody as the lyric with maybe a little intro and outro. And so I don't think anyone's questioning is all the things you are, is it a good song, bad song because of its length. It's almost a kind of, I think, a ridiculous question.

If you walked into a gallery, and you're like, man, canvas sizes are getting really smaller. They're getting really big. It's like, is that really that indicative of what's happening within the frame? It might be in the best album of 2018 was Tierra Wax Wack World, which is... Wack World. For those who don't know, Tierra Wax debut album, Wack World, was made up of 15 songs that were one minute or less.

And one minute is also the maximum length of an Instagram video. And each song had an... opening video. So I see that album is sort of this example of playing around and manipulating with these confines of like the shorter song and creating, you know, in your words, like a smaller canvas and maybe just putting more in it, which I think is interesting. It felt almost like a commentary on the song. This is like commentary on song form because when I listen to it, every single time it got to the minute mark, I was like, oh, I want more of it, which is actually really effective because you're like, I can go back and listen again.

Exactly. It's a really good tactic. But just to your previous point about how, you know, songs have always been shorter, but now there is this sort of anxiety. I think that anxiety is tied to, like, brevity in popular culture or digital platforms as a whole. People are concerned about, you know, light culture where we just respond to everything with a thumbs up or just an emoji. And we're just, like, scrolling through Instagram videos or Snapchat videos kind of numbly. and I think this anxiety over shorter songs or maybe the diminishing quality of music because of shorter songs is actually tied

to maybe the diminishing quality of our communication or interaction with each other because of the way that social media has pervaded like society. It is the deep existential angst working its way. I think that's, Aisha, I think that's, if I can be simple, I think that's a great place to end this conversation because to me, like, what this, what this, you know, your expertise and, and, like, bringing in both some audio examples and some facts about this have made me realize, like, oh, you can't, like, you ultimately, you can't cheat the system.

Like, you can't trick someone into listening to a song. Like, people are only going to listen to music if they like it and they're not if they don't. So it's not, like, music isn't getting any better or worse as a result. of this, but the way we feel about it says a lot about what we're scared of in general, right? I think so. Totally. Wow. You all brought so much thought into this conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

It's been so much fun. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah. Thank you so much. You can go check out Aisha and Dan's piece the reason why your favorite pop songs are getting shorter on courts and we'll put it in our show notes. I want to say thanks to Jeremy Lloyd from Marion Hill. Chris Malanfie from Slate. Go check out his show, Hit Parade. It's great.

And I want to say a special thanks to Courtney Leonard, Crystal Stevens, and Georgia Cowley for making Switched-on-Pop look great. You might not have a notice, but we got a little bit of a makeover. And the design team from Vox, I think, has just done a stunning job. So thank you so much. Switch on Pop is a production of Vox Media, executive production by Nishat Kerwa and Allison Rocky, production by Jillian Weinberger, engineering by Brandon McFarland, Community Manager, Sarah Terry. You can find more shows on any podcast. You player, you use Apple podcast, apps, Spotify, so on, so forth. I'm thinking now, though, Charlie, all our shows should be kept to about 30.

Yeah, maybe just like two minutes and 50 seconds. Yeah, definitely. Let's try that. That'd be fun. You can find more episodes as well on Switchedonpop.com, and we love getting your suggestions on Twitter and Instagram. We are at Switched on Pop. We are going to be back again in another week. So we will see you next Tuesday.

And until them, thanks for listening.