Have you noticed that songs are getting shorter?
The median length of Billboard Hot 100
songs dropped from over four minutes in 2000.
to around three and a half minutes in 2018.
Music is changing because the way
we consume music has completely changed.
Streaming is now king.
It's the biggest source of revenue in the music industry
and a way for artists to bring new attention to their work.
So some music producers are changing the music they create.
To work the system in their favor.
But can chasing stream counts produce good music?
I'm Eduardo Araujo. This is Quartz.
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The way an audience listens to a song
has shaped the music of every era.
Radio spreads new sounds directly into our homes.
The invention of the smaller forty five RPM record
gives birth to the single that we know today.
Cassette tapes with their portability and ease of overdubbing
gives birth to the mix tape.
And now we are here.
Streaming makes up nearly half of all music revenue in the world.
With 232 million monthly listeners on the leading music platform Spotify
there is an unprecedented amount of data
on who is listening and what they're listening to.
- Now you have so much streaming data and information
around not just how many plays they're getting
but what territory people are listening to them in, right,
what their audience looks like.
Is it Millennial is it older right.
Like you can really use data to figure out
who you want to get in front of, who you want to
focus on in a way that you never could before.
- We have engineering over here, this is Max,
creating the products of the future.
Jeff Ponchik is the co-founder and CEO of Repost,
a company that helps artists use data
to get more streams and followers.
- So was that like one of the first things you did
was get yourself a great programmer,
is that step number one?
- Yeah.
Repost has only been around for three years.
And hand selects the artists it wants to work with.
Repost functions like a distributor.
Distributors used to sign deals with labels to act as middlemen
between the label and the record stores.
But now companies like repost help them
reach an audience on their own.
Via places like SoundCloud or Spotify or YouTube.
Jeff estimates that less than 10 percent
of Repost's clients actually live off their music revenue.
But it does open a new door to artists
that wasn't there before in the age of the record label.
- Like not everyone is going to be the next Beyonce, right.
but you might be able to make five ten thousand
dollars a month then you know make a living doing
what you love and not have to work at Starbucks anymore.
One way to maximize profit from streaming
is understanding how payments are made.
The amount artists receive on a single play is minuscule.
Jeff says that on Spotify that number is somewhere
around 0.004 cents per play.
To make any real money they need millions
of streams, and that means playlists have become
the gatekeepers to being heard.
- On Spotify,
it's all about getting in those big Spotify playlists, right.
That's how you get discovered.
- Getting your first playlist is definitely very exciting.
It's just crazy like you never really expect that.
And all of a sudden your song gets a bunch of streams
and you're like wow this is,
this feels good, finally my work kind of paid off.
Some people are hearing it.
Twuan is a lo fi hip hop producer from Salt Lake City.
He started making music at home in high school.
Now he's working with Repost
and says he's living entirely off of his streaming revenue.
Getting on a playlist takes luck and strategy
to catch the attention of a human curator, or game an algorithm.
But there's something simpler artist can do to increase profits.
Make songs shorter.
- If you upload a song to specifically Spotify that's an hour long
or you upload a song that's a minute long,
the amount of revenue you're going to get for either or
is going to be the same per listen as my understanding.
You release an album with a ton of songs on it
that are really short, so it can cycle through
as many tracks as quickly as possible.
It's kind of a way to hack more revenue.
It's a matter of math.
Sixty one minute songs will make 60 times as much
as a 60 minute song.
The structure of the song matters too,
Spotify only pays for songs once the listener
has passed the 30 second point.
This means the first 30 seconds are crucial.
- What we hear in the first 30 seconds
of the song has become almost an overture if you will.
If we were talking about a Broadway production
And will hear certain themes that we may hear reverberated
again throughout the rest of the song.
While there are certainly deviations traditionally songs
are written in ABABCB structure.
But one tactic artists use to keep people engaged
is to move that B, the chorus or the hook,
to the very top of the song.
So that listeners are always waiting
for the catchiest is part of the song
to come back around again.
And you can hear the effects of that in modern pop.
Like with this song.
And this song.
But beyond the data and the money,
there's the craft of actually writing songs
you're proud to put your name on.
For many artists balancing true creativity
With market driven needs is crucial.
- I do see and acknowledge cynically that I could use.
different tactics to make money, but,
I don't want to spend my time thinking that way.
I think the biggest danger with streaming services
is that artists aren't going to be encouraged to make
commercially viable, challenging work
because it's not how they make money.
- Streaming music has utterly transformed the music industry.
It has transformed the music that we hear
and it has transformed the way that we discover
and consume music in general,
in profound ways that I think we're only
just beginning to understand.
Are you discovering new artists through streaming platform?
Tell us who you think has the best streaming playlists
and music in the comments.
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Next week we'll stick with our sonic theme
and look for a specific eerie noise
That has taken over today's film score and sound design.