Shorter Songs Surge

On TikTok and streaming, fragmentary moments rule

IN EARLY OCTOBER, Lil Yachty uploaded the 83-second track “Poland” to SoundCloud along with a grumpy message: “STOP LEAKING MY SHIT.” “Poland” consists of two keening hooks and some slack rhymes; a veteran publishing executive calls it “almost a tweet” more than a song.

Either way, it’s a hit — it reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and it’s indicative of a larger trend: The average length of popular songs has been shrinking steadily for years. “Everyone’s aware of it; it’s a reaction to the culture of sound bites that we moved toward,” says Vincent “Tuff ” Morgan, vp of A&R at independent publisher peermusic. “I have producers in the studio this week just going through and making songs shorter.”

“Poland” isn’t the shortest Hot 100 hit; that honor goes to Piko-Taro’s 45-secondlong “PPAP (Pen Pineapple Apple Pen)” from 2016. The following year, XXXTentacion’s 17 — which featured 11 songs in 21 minutes — became a streaming sensation. In 2018, Travis Scott mashed three 90-second-ish songs into the massively successful “Sicko Mode.”

Short songs are by no means a new development. The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” (1:52) topped the Hot 100 in 1963, and the following year, The Beatles conquered the world two minutes at a time. But if song length was driven then by the pace of AM radio, songwriters and A&R executives attribute today’s concision to streaming services, where short songs are less likely to be skipped and more likely to spur repeat listens, and to shortform video, which has gained a new level of commercial resonance thanks to TikTok. “Generally, a song that pops off on TikTok is based around a little moment,” says songwriter-producer

Elie Rizk (Mazie, Remi Wolf ). “Subconsciously, you think about that: ‘Let’s pack a track with moments.’ I don’t feel the need to repeat a section.”

Singer Capella Grey used similar language in 2021 to describe “Gyalis,” another viral TikTok hit: “It’s just a series of moments.” Writer-producer David Harris (H.E.R., Snoh Aalegra) was among those who took note of that song’s success. “That one was really interesting — just catchy fragments,” he says.

As singles get shorter, so does the gap between a “catchy fragment” and a song. Streaming platforms like Spotify count 30 seconds of listening as a full play that triggers a royalty payout. But a generation native to TikTok may not require that a piece of music be 30 seconds to engage with it. With that in mind, it’s easy to imagine that the length of singles will keep shrinking.

When a short verse goes viral on TikTok, “if that’s what the artist wrote and that’s what’s being used [on the platform], who’s to say that’s not the song?” asks Daniel Sander, chief commercial officer for music technology company Feature. FM. “The question is: How do you monetize that differently?”