Why are songs shrinking? No-one’s totally sure, but it’s likely propelled by technological changes — specifically, streaming. Because streaming services pay the same amount for a song regardless of whether it’s long or short, it’s an incentive for artists to pack an album with lots of shorter tracks. (It may also help them stand out in the remorseless competition online: A short track is a fast listen, and thus possibly more shareable.) The brevity of Tik Tok’s musical windows is another pressure driving artists to keep things tight and focus primarily on writing a hooky chorus.
One could bemoan these changes — damn these kids and their mobile phones, screwing up pop music!
But pop music as we know it today was literally the creation of technological shifts. One in particular: The record player.
When the phonograph — and its precursor, the wax cylinder — first became popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, it dramatically changed the nature of music. It’s a remarkable example of how significantly a new medium can alter the trajectory of art and culture.
Here’s a short (and by no means complete) list of How The Phonograph Changed The World of Music:
1) Performances got shorter — and the 3-minute song was born
Before the phonograph came along, musical performances were often quite lengthy. A folk song might tell a whole epic tale, with a dozen verses. A symphony could last for a good while, as could marching-band tunes. If someone was playing a solo and the crowd was enjoying it, they might string it out. Sure, some songs were short. But there was a lot of headroom up top.
But the wax cylinder and the phonograph had incredibly short limits. At first they could only fit two minutes of sound; later that expanded to about three minutes.
Suddenly, songwriters and musicians had to cut things really short. As William Howland Kenney notes in Recorded Music in American Life, performers started chopping out verses, and truncating solos down to a single passage in a song. Musicians even squeezed out the little natural pauses that — in concert halls — they’d use for dramatic effect. You “become much tighter”, as the cellist Janos Starker noted.
But these constraints also propelled creativity. Once artists realized they had a three-minute limit, they began writing songs that did not merely fit in that tight time frame, but thrived in it. “The three-minute pop song is basically an invention of the phonograph,” as Mark Katz, a professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me when I wrote about this a few years ago for Smithsonian magazine.