NO MORE FOREPLAY

HOW STREAMING HAS CHANGED SONG STRUCTURE

Once upon a time, songs were written for radio. DJs were the priests, the airwaves the altar, and every record had to earn its three minutes of worship. You built up the intro, teased the hook, the congregation sang the chorus, and you waited for the blessing – a chart position.

Now the altar’s gone digital. The new god is the skip button, the 30-second rule of Spotify. If a listener jumps ship before that, it doesn’t count as a stream, and that small rule has reshaped the DNA of popular music. Record producers have become survivalists. No foreplay, no mystery, no indulgent guitar solos. Hit them with the hook then hit them again.

Actually, it’s not new at all. I spent much of the Seventies writing advertising jingles. We jingle writers were ahead of our time – we were formatting Spotify hits before Spotify existed; pop’s new architects are our descendants. Think of the Martini ad (not one of mine, by the way): “It’s the bright one, the right one, that’s Martini!” Nine words, a hook, a slogan, a lifestyle. It sold vermouth in 15 seconds. Today’s producers need to sell each record they make in the same 15 seconds.

Pop songs used to build – from verse to bridge to chorus. A power ballad like I Will Always Love You took its time. Now, producers are terrified of space. The listener might wander off, or worse, start listening to another playlist. So instead of a build-up, you get the chorus upfront — or a snippet of one. No long intro, no suspense. The first fifteen seconds decide your fate. As one producer puts it - “You’re at the party the moment the door opens.”

I did a little research. The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights hits a preview of the chorus at just 6 seconds. Olivia Rodrigo’s Good 4 U opens with the chorus as a bass riff, running underneath the verse. Taylor Swift’s Opalite starts straight in with the piano playing the chorus melody. In the 1990s, songs were happy to take a minute to get there. Today, that would be single suicide.

Songs are shrinking. The global average length of a hit has fallen to around 2 minutes 40 seconds. The reason isn’t mystery. It’s maths. Instead of a four-minute song, you make it two minutes with an ending that matches the intro. The listener presses replay and it loops into something almost continuous. That makes it two plays instead of one - double the algorithmic favour – double the cash.

Algorithms that encourage songs to be shorter also encourage the production of extra versions. Remix culture thrives on keeping streams repeating without pause — a sped-up version, a slowed-down version, an acoustic version, a version with a guest rapper nobody asked for. Key in the title and you’ll hear an eight-minute version put together from four two-minute versions – that’s four streams and four chart-placement points. The song isn’t made to please the audience; it’s made for the algorithm.

In the old days, A&R men listened with their gut. Now their guts have been replaced by dashboards and skip-rate graphs. As producer Mark Ronson puts it, “Streaming has turned pop into a science project.”

New artists have never known anything different. They don’t think in verses and bridges but in “moments”. Something that works as a meme, a dance, a snippet. It’s what the advertising industry used to call “the sonic logo.”

So - is it bad? Not necessarily. There’s an art to compaction. The Beatles were masters of it. She Loves You is barely two minutes long and starts right from the top with the chorus. The algorithm would give it ten out of ten. Even Beethoven understood it and slammed straight into the hook at the start of his Fifth.

The danger is monotony. When everything is designed to grab attention, nothing feels surprising. I miss the quiet bit, the delayed payoff, the little hesitations - the foreplay.

Ninety per cent of songs now go for the full hump by 45 seconds. Heavy petting by 25. A few artists are pushing back. Sam Fender’s Rein Me In unfolds at pre-digital pace, as does Harry Styles’ Aperture – daring you to wait.

Patience, once a casualty, is now a rebel.

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