Recently, music has been more accessible than ever. You have everything you want at your fingertips, though this comes with the consequence of what once made the art so special. Streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music have changed how we listen to music, but with the change, it has deprived us of aspects of the experience we once had. This has impacted not only the consumption but also the production of music, such as the writing and production of albums.
We see this in song length music is shorter than it used to be, but why might this be? These streaming platforms don’t care about the music but about engagement; the clicks are what these artists are paid for. Spotify rewards more streams, and shorter tracks usually get more plays per hour compared to long ones. One example that comes to mind is “Fancy That,” an album by PinkPantheress, an album that consists of 9 songs and only being 20 minutes. This has caused listeners to prefer fast hooks and immediate choruses. This guarantees the attention needed in the part of the song that pays the most. The long introductions that were once adored are becoming even more rare in the mainstream music scene.
Ironically, albums have become longer in number of tracks while being even more shallow. This is a result of how charting works; there is an incentive to pack albums with more short tracks because more tracks and more streams mean better chart numbers. Having an abundance of tracks does not correlate with a deeper or thoughtful experience. There will be ‘filler’ songs that are designed to perform better on a streaming platform and the algorithm, as opposed to an artistic piece. The meaning of an album has lost a lot of its weight because of these streaming platforms; they used to be a journey or a story told by the artist. Now, many are like a stockpile of singles used for playlist bait to get on the charts.
Streaming has changed the business aspect of music. You used to buy an album or a CD and media produced by the artist. Now it’s a subscription service with millions of tracks at your disposal. And while music being accessible is great in many aspects, like providing platforms for emerging artists, it makes the music feel less meaningful. The revenue an artist receives per stream is tiny, less than a cent, and artists need huge numbers to make a living. Artists are less inclined to take weeks or months to compose a song when another, less heartfelt track has a viral snippet. The work is being overshadowed by the trend.
People listen differently because of streaming. They don’t start an album to listen to the lyrics and absorb the media, but skip around and take away some piece they may enjoy, such as creating playlists. Among social media platforms like TikTok and Reels highlight clips and short-form content, a 30-second video to get attention, ruining the attention span of many, but also devaluing the full song and full story. This limits the ability to deeply listen to the art, making it difficult for an artist to create something slow or an album that takes time to listen to.
Streaming services are convenient because you can have any song in your pocket, you can find new artists, you don’t have to spend a small fortune on your favorite artist’s discography, you can listen to your favorite individual songs through a playlist, and you can share your own media much more easily, and you have a higher chance of getting exposure. This is meaningful and has value, but in return, artists suffer because of the creation of the algorithm. When you factor in “sounds good on this playlist” or virality being a part of how successful you get, it doesn’t come as a surprise when artists aim for those goals. Streaming and the upsides to it will not be touched, but it pushes you to think, has the culture of music we once had gone? And will ambitious art survive in this era of streams and virality? If we don’t care to think about these issues, music is at risk of losing its human experience and becoming a shallow shell of what it used to be.
