Drawing listener attention in popular music: Testing five musical features arising from the theory of attention economy

Technological changes in the last 30 years have influenced the way we consume music, not only granting immediate access to a much larger collection of songs than ever before, but also allowing us to instantly skip songs. This new reality can be explained in terms of attention economy, which posits that attention is the currency of the information age, since it is both scarce and valuable. The purpose of these two studies is to examine whether popular music compositional practices have changed in the last 30 years in a way that is consistent with attention economy principles. In the first study, 303 U.S. top-10 singles from 1986 to 2015 were analyzed according to five parameters: number of words in title, main tempo, time before the voice enters, time before the title is mentioned, and self-focus in lyrical content. The results revealed that popular music has been changing in a way that favors attention grabbing, consistent with attention economy principles. In the second study, 60 popular songs from 2015 were paired with 60 less popular songs from the same artists. The same parameters were evaluated. The data were not consistent with any of the hypotheses regarding the relationship between attention economy principles within a comparison of popular and less popular music.