Erika’s Epic: Music in the age of the 47-second attention span, is the Internet to blame for shorter songs?

By Opinion Editor Erika Liu

Unlike others in the skramz genre, which would, according to one archived Drowned in Sound blogpost, “literally sprint toward the finish line … barely even considering structure or dynamics,” City of Caterpillar takes its time. It’s not uncommon for a single track from this band to last over 10 minutes. Oceanic rhythms may go on for minutes at a time, punctuated by frenetic scream-singing and apocalyptic finales. It’s a poignant effect, emergent in only something cumulative, something spanning the greater end of ten minutes.

As Norwegian philosopher Guttorm Floistad once wrote, “If you want to hang on, you better speed up.” City of Caterpillar didn’t hang on and didn’t speed up and are, along with long songs in general, mostly phased out of the current industry. Songs under three minutes, one Washington Post article says, have exploded in popularity in recent years to make up a majority of top 100 hits. Albums today have swelled to an average of 15 songs per 30-minute release in the interest of maximizing streaming revenue. On the flip side, the number of top 100 songs over five minutes has shrunk to 0–1% on yearly charts. 

People’s attention is a finite currency that companies want to exploit. This is especially so on social media, where a flashier headline, brighter image, or shorter song might translate to money in the real world. In a modern world where we’re surrounded by a constant, seething static of new things to watch, experience, learn, and listen to, oftentimes, this “attention” that influencers, corporations, and algorithms vie for so viciously might be better described as a rapidly-worsening inattention. There is a reason as to why the average adult attention span has dropped from 30 minutes in the 1980s to 47 seconds today, why songs race with increasing desperation toward that 2-minute or even 1-minute mark, and why many long acts get selectively bred out of an increasingly cutthroat, metrics-driven industry. It’s not that short songs are bad. It’s just that they fit an increasingly narrow description of how you make art in an age defined by people’s attention and the profits you reap by exploiting people’s attention.

Slowing down is a sort of reprieve from the anxiety of taking part in a world whose pace is dictated by our own rapidly disintegrating attention spans. Maybe City of Caterpillar stuck out to me because of its unmanufactured sincerity to that end. It was not created to hang on, keep up, or profit off of.  It is slow and almost archaic in a way that is totally human.

I’ll probably keep scrolling. I get bored. But I will still feel a sort of regret. Attention, outside of being a fungible asset, is a way of taking part in this world. We should try to set aside at least some of it, unfractured, for ourselves.