Are songs getting shorter?

In the early days of rock’n’roll, songs routinely clocked in between two and three minutes. Anything longer than that and you’d risk radio ignoring your single. But when the album gained traction in the 1960s, the average length of songs began to increase. By the time we got to 2000, most pop songs were in the range of four minutes and twenty seconds.

Since then, though, we’ve seen a slow shortening of songs. Chartmetric has this graphic to show where things are today.

And this outlines things by genre.

So it’s an across-the-board situation? What’s behind this trend? Well, it’s…complicated.