Between our shrinking attention spans and increasing competition, the world’s biggest songs are among the shortest ever made.
In a report released by Samsung in December 2020, scientists found the average consumer attention span is now 8-seconds long. That discovery is 33% lower than a similar study from 2000 that claimed consumers had 12-second attention spans. Four seconds may not sound like a great deal to some, but in the age of streaming, every moment counts — now more than ever.
The team behind the study cites our shrinking attention spans as one of two main factors shaping the current state of music. The other factor is streaming, which grants consumers so much access to content that every artist must work harder to grab and hold listeners’ attention. These two forces are making songwriters rethink their approach to crafting hit songs. So much so that the same report claims that by 2030 the average length of a hit song will be two-minutes. That is about half the length of a hit song from the 1990s.
Proof of the study’s findings is everywhere. One look at streaming charts, and anyone can see that most popular songs are already under four-minutes in length, with many far shorter than that. 24KGoldn’s inescapable 2020 hit “Mood,” for example, runs just two-minutes and twenty-one seconds. Billie Eilish’s “Therefore I Am” is slightly longer, coming in at two-minutes and fifty-four seconds.
In the latest Music Biz News update, host James Shotwell reports on the study’s findings and what it means for the future of music. He also explains how introducing emerging trends in popular music can help artists from all corners of the industry increase their chances of writing a breakout hit. Check it out:
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In a time when culture is evolving faster than ever, Emmure vocalist Frankie Palmeri is sharing his regrets over past lyrical choices.
When Frankie Palmeri’s band Emmure burst onto the music scene in the late 2000s, nobody was ready for the band’s brutally honest lyricism and devastatingly heavy sound. Throughout multiple releases, many under the Victory Records banner, Palmeri wrote about heartache and the anger he felt toward the world around him without consideration for how his word choices might impact listeners. He spoke of murdering exes, hurting his enemies, and having sex with his listeners’ girlfriends with total disregard for how his art might make people feel.
But that was another time. The world has changed a lot since Emmure burst onto the scene, and the affinity for ultraviolent, highly-profane lyricism fans of heavy music once enjoyed has waned. Some may see that as a bad thing, but others believe that creating music with more awareness of how things impact listeners makes the heavier areas of music more accessible to more people.
This week, Palmeri took to Twitter to renounce his past lyricism. In a multi-tweet post, the Emmure frontman wrote:
“Hanging out with someone who only listens to metalcore made [me] realize why regular people with healthy neuroplasticity don’t fuck with that genre of music and gravitate towards pop/rap. Talk about a fucking unnecessary onslaught of bullshit emotions.
“Trust me when I say; I emotionally and spiritually reject almost every lyric I’ve ever written. It all stems from material pain, a fragile ego, an inability to cope. It’s unfortunate anyone has ever identified with any of what I’ve said in my music. A lot [of] people are/were hurting.”
Frankie Palmeri via Twitter
You can view Palmeri’s original tweets below.
It’s hard to know what the lead Palmeri to make this announcement, but rumors of a new Emmure record being on the way have circled the internet for months. If so, Palmeri’s comments could signal a departure from the group’s previous efforts, which fans may or may not embrace.
More importantly, it’s is refreshing to see an artist reconsider their past actions through the lens of cultural acceptance and emotional maturity. Palmeri once wrote, “ask your girl what my d-ck tastes like,” and now he’s apologizing for it. That’s character development, and we could use more of that in the metalcore world.
Streaming has made a significant impact on songwriting. So much so, that the entire music industry is trying to catch up to ‘The Spotify Sound.’
No one knew what Spotify would do to the music business. People were quick to assume the easy of access to the majority of all recorded music would lure people away from physical media, but no one thought to consider the ripple effect that seismic shift in consumer behavior would create.
Physical sales of music were on the decline before Spotify launched, but the now ten-year-old company and its competitors in the streaming market have also created a drop in download sales. A few niche formats found success in the early 2010s, specifically vinyl and cassette tapes, but those trends have also fizzled as streaming continues to gain momentum.
The latest evolution resulting from the age of streaming concerns songwriting. With most streaming platforms counting a play after consumers have listened to the track for thirty-seconds, more emphasis than ever is being placed on the way songs begin. There is also added emphasis on the runtime of tracks, as well as the volume of material being released.
On this episode of Music Biz 101, host James Shotwell explains the phenomenon know as ‘The Spotify Sound’ and offers a two-step solution to writing songs that generate a high volume of streams.
This post is the latest in our ongoing collaboration series with Sonicbids. Enjoy.
Be honest: have your lyrics ever found you down on your knees and begging please, or noting that when things change, they also rearrange? Has anything in one of your songs ever cut like a knife?
If you’re 16 and in your first band, you can be forgiven for coming up with the same metaphors and phrases that have occurred to thousands before you, but if you want to be a real lyricist, you should be aware of these overused lyrical concepts. It’s the only way to avoid them!
1. “Cold as ice”
This tired simile, usually applied to a woman who’s not interested (or no longer interested) in the male songwriter, might be the number-one most trite phrase in music.
Try this instead: You can change the subject and the substance of this silly simile. Roger Waters flipped this one on its head all the way back in 1977 on “One of My Turns” when he sang that he felt “cold as a razor blade.” Better still, he was talking about depression and self-harm, not lost love.
2. “It cuts like a knife”
This is not only a common metaphor for love, it’s a stupid one. Love makes one feel lots of things, but it’s never once made me feel as though I was cut by a knife. Stabbed, perhaps, but not sliced.
Try this instead: If one must use a painful metaphor for love, consider some other sources of pain and/or death (probably skipping drowning – that one’s overused, too): choking, electrocution, burning, gunshots, blunt-force trauma, road rash, or some sort of allergic reaction. All of these have been used, and some of them used a lot, but most songwriters go for the knife.
3. “I’m down on my knees”
Usually rhymed with “please,” this bluesy couplet retreads the same theme of lost love, and more specifically an undignified plea for affection that once was freely given.
Try this instead: Throw the whole phrase out, and find another way to express your feeling. Warren Zevon, an encyclopedia of interesting lyrics, dodged all cliché when addressing this concept on “Accidentally, Like a Martyr,” singing, “Never thought I’d have to pay so dearly / for what was already mine.”
Surely there are other, more colorful ways to address the demeaning act of begging a lover to stay… like mentioning whatever you did to piss him or her off in the first place.
4. When everything happens “tonight”
Is there a word or syllable missing in your lyric? Just add the word “tonight.” This word haunts the end of millions of phrases, more common than a comma or a period. It’s the inevitable word that replaces an actual idea the lyricist might have.
Try this instead: The worst thing about this one is the total lack of any sense of time in most lyrics that feature it. It’s always “tonight,” a night that is going on now and will never end… and it would be more effective in future tense.
For example, “You’re my baby tonight” (more on “baby” later) is a lot less interesting than whatever is going to happen later, creating a sense of tension. “I’m crawling out my window tonight,” or “Meet me at the railroad tracks tonight” are examples.
5. “Things aren’t always what they seem”
Well, no, they’re not, but this trite vaguery doesn’t actually mean anything, like when Polonius cried, “To thine own self be true” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What the Bard intended as the babble of a fool has become universally cited as profound advice. For some reason, this cliché has come home to roost in hard rock and heavy metal more than other genres. Maybe it’s the drugs, but even when the world is confusing and strange to sensitive artists, this one should be left out.
Try this instead: Maybe this concept of confusion and uncertainty can be expressed more easily through music than lyrics. That’s what psychedelic music is, right? Grab your wah-wah pedal and soak those tracks in delay.
6. “Walking,” “climbing,” and “swimming”: the triathlon of love
How many times have we heard about how far the songwriter will walk, climb, or swim to reach a lover? And isn’t this whole concept a little archaic? In a world in which one can drive through a tunnel from England in be in France minutes later, the idea of a loved one being thousands of miles away just doesn’t have the impact it did when all those miles had to be on horseback.
Try this instead: Being a week’s ride from your beloved meant a lot more in the 1800s than it does today. That power of distance returns when the song itself is a period piece, taking the listener back to early times, as Cordelia’s Dad does on this folk number about sailing across the sea in exile.
7. “Baby”
Who knows when or why we started calling everyone “baby”? Think about your friends and family. Who in your circle can get away with calling you that? Technically, calling an adult a baby is a metaphor… just a really, really lame one. But if you’re going metaphorical, the sky’s the limit.
Try this instead: You can use any pet name or any comparison you’d like. Nobody thinks of AC/DC as an especially poetic band, but when Brian Johnson sang “she was a fast machine” on “You Shook Me All Night Long,” that was actually a pretty nice metaphor. Think how much weaker the line would have been if he sang, “She was my baby.” Try anything, anything but the baby.
8. “Soar like an eagle” and “learning to fly”
Birds, with their beauty, their spectacular aerial skills, and their long migrations have always inspired artists of all kinds. Songwriters are constantly learning to fly or mending damaged wings, two metaphorical clichés that deserve to finally die. That doesn’t mean that all flight metaphors need to go, but if you’re going to call someone a bird, at least be specific.
Try this instead: The names of specific species or types of things often have more poetic and evocative value than vague terms like “bird,” as Sun Kil Moon explore on their whole album Admiral Fell Promises. Songwriter Mark Kozelek mentions hummingbirds, pigeons, and gulls to give his listeners a sense of place, evoking oceans, deserts, or pastoral scenes.
Think whip-poor-wills, mockingbirds, redstarts, harriers, and nighthawks. The sounds and appearance of different birds can conjure thoughts of specific places and times, like geese flocking in the fall in New England or the calls of thrushes in the spring. But let’s give the eagle and the dove a rest; they’ve definitely done their bit.
Jesse Sterling Harrison is an author, recording artist, and part-time farmer. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, three daughters, and a herd of ducks.
Hello and welcome to another installment of the Haulix ‘Advice’ series. We have featured a lot of great content this week, and I think you’re really going to enjoy what we have in store for you today. If you have any suggestions for future installments of this column, or if you have a question you’d like us to tackle in the weeks ahead, please email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. You can also find us on Twitter.
We’ve all heard the expression that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to truly master any craft, and in this post we’re going to examine why writing 10,000 bad songs will have the same effect on your songwriting.
If you read our previous post on writer’s block you’ll recall that one of the top tips for strengthening your mind is making a commitment to write each and every day regardless of your actual desire to create. Fighting through the resistance of not ‘feeling it’ or otherwise not being in the mood to make something out of nothing trains your brain over time to let the creative juices flow more freely, but anyone who actually creates for a living knows this is a task far easier said than done. Even if you can get to a point where you write every day, it can be incredibly hard for creative people to be okay with something they make being ‘ok,’ mediocre, or even flat-out terrible. Creative types believe they have great art waiting to get out of their mind, but bad songs can appear to speak to the opposite being the case.
Here’s a hard truth: You need to write a lot of bad songs, or at the very least you need to write a lot of songs and see them through to completion regardless of whether or not they are bad because it’s the only way you can begin to understand the recipe for proficient songwriting. There are a few lucky souls who simply have a knack for crafting catchy songs, but the vast majority of artists only have an idea of what good music is, and they spend their entire career trying to fully grasp that concept without taking the time to explore the pros and cons of their theory. Writing constantly will allow you to better understand your own tendencies as a songwriter, and through examining the bad songs you can begin to sort out the elements of your style that you do not like.
Bad songs are not actually bad, they’re simply stepping stones toward the next great song that must be overcome if you’re ever going to evolve as an artist. We’ve all known groups who found a sound that worked for them and stuck with it as long as there were people willing to support them. While there is certainly nothing wrong with this approach, it does not bode well for your career trajectory. Change keeps people interested in your music and it keeps you challenged as a musician, but if you want to change you’re going to encounter bad songs along the way. Realizing they exist to help strengthen your career and not harm it will only aide your development, so embrace the mediocrity and whatever you do – KEEP WRITING.
