The length of music in 2020

 Yesterday I was listening to a song called twilight zone by Golden Earrings which I had heard on a Dutch rock radio station. This sparked a thought an 8 minute song was being played in another country on a genre specific station and it was in English. This struck me because there are many many radio stations which play either genre specific or songs from the past yet the next day when i tuned in to some for a fun test I found that none of them played a song over 3-4 mins which is the average length of a song admittedly I didn't have enough time or resources to see if I just listened at an unrepresentative time but even then it did solidify my belief in something: That certain genres mainly other than pop have longer songs. on the surface this may seem obvious jazz has a free flow structure so may run longer classical and opera can go on for longer periods especially if played in totality and rock and heavy metal in some places have whole sections of songs just dedicated to instrumentals or guitar solos and so on. The reason this ended up bothering me is because in almost every genre you can probably find a subsection or basic which makes their songs longer than pop songs on average yet even with all of this and genres becoming more mainstream pop songs are getting shorter than their genre counterparts. there are many reasons for this at least if you go back to the start say 1900 music recordings were still very much in infancy but they existed and pe3ople wanted music it brings music into your home with replayability yet the technology didn't exist yet for the longer songs to be put onto these and if so they were very much shortened so it was on the musicians side to accommodate this and make smaller songs and to sell these a lot of them had to invent some sort of hook creating what I think the first catchy pop songs. Then as music technology continued song recordings got longer to fill the space music technology even advanced further ahead with many records having multiple songs on one side but even then many songs had to split themselves onto both sides of the record. and longer songs got pushed to the side as the catchy 3 minute pop song was more preferable for many therefore monetarily pushing aside longer songs. This led to what I experienced longer songs went to genres which may not have been underground or existed as a subculture because as the artists in these less popular genres created music they didn't have to worry about song length not to say pop artists didn't care about their music just that they were comfortable and more able to make their songs shorter. but as these genres became more mainstream their longer more different songs shot up the charts as it was something different but slowly over the years many genres began to fit into that mould whether they were in the charts or not because it worked. It sometimes had the opposite with Bohemian rhapsody arguably Queens biggest hit being a 6 minute long genre mashup but songs but the opposite effect is few and far between. Another thing that confused me was streaming services as surely with the invention of these limiting radio physical copies would slowly lead to artists making longer and longer music with freedom and ever largening audiences to supply that change but it's had the opposite affect as while streaming has led to larger audiences it pays less joined with music piracy musicians are making much less money as when making a long song costs go up for many musicians and bands especially ones which aren't in the mainstream cost outweighs profit. As well as being a difficult market to get into SoundCloud for example has made it much easier for anyone to create music. this all leads to shorter songs in a market which is too crowded with smaller musicians getting pushed to the wayside. while some may say Soundcloud solved this the cost of making longer songs still isn't viable in such a crowded market. pop songs in 2018 were 1 minute and 13 seconds shorter than they were in 2018. and with the recent announcement from Spotify that they will let artists promote to more people for a cut in royalty rates this is set to get worse. artists are still gonna make long songs but they will probably be harder to find especially in the future. Some people suggest that because of this the future for many artists is machines and robots removing alot of musicians altogether.(this was much more dire than I expected) No matter what artists will make long music so maybe the point is a little bit moot. within the next few days probably Thursday their will be a blog post about video game movies :-)