Remember those drawn-out, dramatic intros in the 80s pop power ballads? According to a study, they have almost disappeared, and listeners' brief attention may be to blame for this. Intros that lasted more than 20 seconds on average in the mid-1980s are now only about 5 seconds long, the study found. Depending on what makes your musical world beat, the popularity of streaming services might be due or cursed for the instrumental intro.

Music streaming

Hubert Léveillé Gauvin spent a few months listening to and analyzing songs that were in the top 10 from 1986 to 2015 and discovered a dramatic change from long intros. He also documented a marked increase in pace. And Léveillé Gauvin found that singers of the most recent successful songs hardly lose time before mentioning the song title in the lyrics. Another change he noticed: the names of the songs are shorter than they used to be, and often consist of only a single word. This evolution is probably driven by what Léveillé Gauvin calls the 'attention economy' of modern pop. And that means artists move to the musical point faster for the sake of grabbing a capricious audience, many of whom tune into Spotify, Pandora and other streaming services.

Hubert Léveillé Gauvin:

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