​​Beyoncé and Taylor Swift kicked off 2024 with new albums that grew to become immediate classics with their followers — and left everybody else questioning the place they’d discover time to hearken to them.

Bey’s Cowboy Carter clocked in at one hour and 18 minutes, whereas Swift’s The Tortured Poets Division got here in at simply over two hours. Extra not too long ago, nonetheless, there’s been a swing again within the different course: Sabrina Carpenter’s Brief n’ Candy lives as much as its title at 36 minutes, whereas Katy Perry’s 143 is a mere 33 minutes. When Miranda Lambert dropped her tenth studio album, Postcards From Texas, in September, she famous that the album’s 45-minute runtime meant followers ought to be capable to pay attention “high to backside” at the least as soon as.

So are quick albums a pattern that’s right here to remain, or is it only a coincidence? David Nathan, a former senior vp of promotion and artist growth at Republic Data (residence to Lambert, Swift, Ariana Grande and extra) thinks it has to do with the data overload of recent leisure. “Music consumption has modified drastically since streaming began,” he tells Us. “Listeners are favoring extra digestible content material and consuming it in a short time.”

The arrival of streaming initially meant that artists, free of the time constraints of bodily media like CDs and vinyl LPs, might make albums so long as their wildest desires, however there’s a lot media to devour as of late that two hours is quite a bit to ask of listeners. “Artists are all the time attempting to create tighter, extra cohesive narratives … particularly in an period the place each tune has to justify its presence on the monitor record,” Nathan explains. “This strategy additionally results in extra conceptual albums and even EPs, the place artists can deal with high quality over amount.”

Nathan doesn’t assume longer-form albums will ever vanish fully (see Submit Malone’s 87-minute September drop F-1 Trillion: Lengthy Mattress), particularly amongst these musicians who’ve a conceptual story to inform. He cites Swift for example, noting that her followers are all the time keen to listen to what she has to say, regardless of how lengthy or quick it’s.

“She’s nonetheless releasing longer-form [albums] and virtually telling a narrative within them,” says Nathan, who can also be the cofounder of Completely happy Jack Leisure and a psychological well being advocate. “They’ve audiences which might be very engaged they usually wish to hear content material. They wish to see their devoted followers listening to a whole physique of labor, and you may’t all the time be that artist. … Artists determine primarily based on their viewers the sort of impression that they wish to make and how much music they wish to put out, whether or not it’s short-form or lengthy.”

For now, nonetheless, brevity appears to be the secret. As Nathan places it, “The eye span is simply too quick!”

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