Catering to the impatient digital listener: Accelerated composition patterns in popular music, 1986–2020

The present study explored trends of compositional acceleration in top hit songs as a potential consequence of streaming platforms and digital habits of music consumption. Many media users have been shifting towards ‘Permanently online, permanently connected’ (Vorderer et al., 2018) behaviors and are thus likely to face choice overload in many episodes of music consumption. In turn, the creative audio industries seem to adjust strategically to altered audience demands that platforms can identify in their mass data traces. Extending a study by Léveillé Gauvin (2018), we investigate five compositorial features (main tempo, time before voice enters, time before title is mentioned, number of words in song title, and song duration) for Billboard top 10 songs (1986 to 2020) and ‘Spotify’ top 10 songs (2016 to 2020). Across features, long-term trends of accelerated composition have mostly continued in recent years, but only weak evidence was secured for a particular booster effect of the competitive ‘Spotify’ ecology on compositorial acceleration.