If you’ve ever listened to an old song, you might have noticed that they often seem to run longer. In an attempt to find out whether that feeling is true or not, we decided to compare the Billboard Hot 100 across 4 decades, with the last counting from just a year ago. In our result, we did indeed find out that songs are getting shorter, and with a dramatic pace. Are songs getting shorter?
The Billboard Hot 100 singles comparison
To try to answer the question whether songs really are getting shorter or not, we decided to compare the Billboard Year-End 100 lists at four different occasions ten years apart. We decided to choose the years 1995, 2005, 2015 and 2025. For each track length, we then calculated the average song length and divided the sum by 100 to calculate an average song length for each of the years. The track length was calculated according to the song’s total run time on Spotify. Only the original mix was written, and therefore remixes and remasters were avoided where possible.
For the genre comparison, each of the 100 songs was assigned one broad primary genre. Because many songs combine several styles, these classifications are subjective and are intended only to identify broad changes in the chart.
Here are the results we got:
| Year | Average song length | Change from 1995 |
| 1995 | 4:24 | |
| 2005 | 3:58 | -26 seconds |
| 2015 | 3:40 | -44 seconds |
| 2025 | 3:24 | -60 seconds |
The result was surprising. Across the four decades, the average song length had shortened by a minute. Percent-wise, the average song had shortened by 22,7 % from 1995 to 2025 with the biggest drop happening between 1995 and 2005. The trend is clear and impossible to ignore, songs are indeed getting shorter.
Shorter songs doesn’t necessarily mean simpler songs
In a doctoral dissertation published by Jeffrey S. Ensign in 2015, he analysed 402 different songs that reached the top 20 on Billboard Hot 100 at the year end. In a similar way, Ensign found that songs had shortened in length over the years. In contrast, he had found an opposite trend between 1955 and 1989, where songs increasingly kept getting longer. So what happened around 1990 that shortened songs further?
The mix of genres throughout the decades
Although the mix of genres may have influenced average song length, there is no single genre that has clearly been behind the shortening trend throughout all four decades. Hip-hop and rap grew substantially between 1995 and 2005, which may have influenced the largest drop in average song length. However, its share then declined again by 2015 and 2025, while songs continued to get shorter.
The same pattern can be seen elsewhere. Pop and dance music became overwhelmingly dominant in 2015, while country music grew dramatically by 2025, yet the average song length continued falling regardless of which genre dominated the chart. This suggests that the decline cannot simply be explained by one genre replacing another.
Instead, the fact that songs became shorter across very different musical styles points towards a broader change in how popular music is written, produced and consumed.
The changing structure of popular songs
One clue may lie in how songs themselves are structured. Ensign found that shorter songs did not necessarily become simpler. Instead, popular songs increasingly contained a greater number of smaller sections and became more complex, suggesting that songwriters were fitting more structural movement into less time.
He also found that chorus-first structures became more common during the 2000s. Rather than requiring a verse to build towards the chorus, some songs could introduce one of their most recognizable sections almost immediately.
Conclusion
Through comparing the year-end list of the Billboard Hot 100 across four different decades, we found that songs are getting shorter. Although this selection isn’t representative of the music industry as a whole, it provides a strong indication of how mainstream music has progressed over time. The decline doesn’t hide behind a single factor, but rather behind a combination of changes in how music is written, produced and consumed. Although modern songs haven’t necessarily gotten simpler, they have become more compressed.