“It stretches the limits of one-minute songs,” the New Yorker wrote. The album consists of 15 tracks, all exactly one minute in length, and each is paired with a one-minute long video (the maximum duration allowed on Instagram).

Rap artist Tierra Whack’s debut album, Whack World, shows that the concept of the super short song can be an artistic challenge in and of itself. “There’s a real production component to it,” Ponchick said, when it comes to “churning out beats and selling licenses.” Rap is also currently the most popular music genre, so it’s fertile ground to plant new content in-and as always, the more streams, the better.Īnd maybe brevity is becoming an art form in itself. After someone writes a beat and licenses it out for someone to rap over, it’s more efficient to keep things short, impactful, and move on. “Part of it is there’s an entire sort of beat-making culture,” he said. Ponchick provides one explanation for why rap songs from newer artists are getting shorter and doing so more quickly. “I just want my music to be better than yesterday…I don’t care if a song is one minute and 30 seconds-streaming is a form of currency, I get that, but it’s not where my head’s at.” making music that will sell out and is nothing I actually like, just so I can pop off,” Wild told Quartz. “It’s a constant mental game to make music that I want to listen in my car vs. While Wild acknowledges that shorter tracks help streaming volume, it’s an unwelcome pressure for artists who, like her, who came into the industry with art, and not the business of streaming, in mind. Naomi Wild is a Los Angeles-based artist who got her start on SoundCloud before partnering with Repost, and her accolades include writing and singing on the hit track “ Higher Ground” from Odesza’s Grammy-nominated album, A Moment Apart. (Cycling through a whole record ups streaming revenue too.) Variation is one solution: Listeners will more likely listen through an entire album because short songs mean that the next new track is never too long away, which works even if the album as a whole is long in length. Popular reports that humans’ attention spans are shortening have been widely disputed, but that doesn’t mean that users don’t get bored more quickly than they used to. Across Repost’s more than 5,000 artists and the numerous platforms they partner with, Ponchick said “the artists who do well with us are artists who put out content frequently and content that’s shorter in length.”īesides the impact of streaming, short songs might just be part of the instant gratification culture of the digital age. “This is a total strategy to game the system,” Ponchick said. Ponchick explained that since one stream typically earns the same no matter the track length, there’s an incentive to create shorter songs to garner as many streams as possible. (Spotify declined to comment on this story.)

After royalties have been split amongst everyone, including the writers, producers, and performers, that doesn’t leave the remaining 90% with much revenue, so volume matters. What’s more, the top 10% of artists dominate 99% of streams, such as Drake and Ed Sheeran, who have tracks exceeding one billion streams. Digital Music News reports that Spotify pays about $0.00397 per stream, which is about equivalent to Ponchick’s estimate.

One million streams on Spotify generates about $7,000, CNBC reports, although Jeff Ponchick, founder of Repost Network, a digital distributor that connects artists to platforms like Spotify and SoundCloud, told Quartz this number is closer to $4,000.

Curren$y the game spotify