Month: November 2018

Why Your Favorite Pop Songs Are Getting Shorter

Jason Tate

Aisha Hassan & Dan Kopf, writing for QZ:

The median length of Billboard Hot 100 songs dropped from over four minutes in 2000 to around three and a half minutes in 2018. Over the last few years, the number of songs in the Hot 100 under two and a half minutes skyrocketed from just around 1% of songs in 2015 to over 6% in 2018.

So what happened? Streaming appears to be a big part of the story. In 2015, streaming overtook digital downloads as the music industry’s biggest source of revenue in the US. And streaming has dominated ever since: In 2015, it accounted for 34.3% of revenue, and that’s increased to 75% in 2018. In the process, many artists have adapted to the way their music is consumed. More streams make more money, but even then it’s not a lot, which is why volume is so crucial.

Lil Peep Died Before Becoming Pop Royalty. His New Music May Change That.

The New York Times
Jason Tate

Jon Caramanica, writing for The New York Times:

Lil Peep died of an accidental drug overdose last November at 21. Afterward, attention turned to his computer. First, it went to London, where the files were backed up by First Access Entertainment, the company that helped guide his career.

Then it went to his mother, Liza Womack. In an interview in her cozy Long Island home, sitting on a nondescript couch that belonged to Peep and was shipped cross-country after his death, she calmly recalled walking into an Apple store, handing the laptop to a clerk, and saying: “My son died. This is him. Take this and put it on a new one.”

Sometime after that, in London, the producer George Astasio and Peep’s longtime musical collaborator Smokeasac finally set out to catalog its contents. What they found were Lil Peep’s complete recordings — some finished, some in fragments; some heard and familiar, many not.