The corporate tactic of shrinkflation has ruffled consumers’ feathers since the stagflation of the ’70s. If price gouging is openly ripping customers off, then shrinkflation — secretly reducing the size or quality, and therefore value — of the products consumers are buying is ripping customers off quietly, hoping nobody will notice that they are paying for worse products than they were just a few years ago. Big industries are subjecting our society to their campaigns of shrinkflation without our input or, often and by design, our notice.
Commonly noticed examples of reductions in size or quality might include a decrease of food in packaged goods like bags of chips with no reduction in prices. But what if I told you that the music industry is one of the worst offenders when it comes to shrinkflation? That is, songs of all genres are becoming shorter and less creative, deprived of their full potential, in order to maximize their profitability. Big label songwriters are sacrificing artistic expression and musical ingenuity on the altar of stakeholder value in favor of more formulaic, bite-sized ditties. And as much as I love music, I can’t stand bite-sized ditties.
A song is ‘supposed’ to be at most three minutes long. This mindset has reigned supreme for as long as pop music has existed, and it’s why 90% of the songs on the Billboard Hot 100 this week are shorter than four minutes. In theory, distilling a song down to three minutes or less condenses all of its musical goodness into an easy-to-digest pill and thereby purifies it, such that each second is packed with as much greatness as possible, like a bowl of Lucky Charms with only marshmallows. Take, for instance, the Beatles’ Revolver, a universally acclaimed (though somewhat overrated) and impressively efficient album, where the average song length is less than two minutes and thirty seconds. The album’s most famous song, “Eleanor Rigby,” takes only two minutes and six seconds to establish itself as a staple. Other short hit songs include “Washing Machine Heart” by Mitski at two minutes and eight seconds long and “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X which is one minute and 53 seconds long. Clearly, short songs can be good or even great.
However, the fact that short songs can be good is kind of like the fact that someone can ride a bike if they shoot themselves in the foot. Shortening a song imposes a handicap that impedes the song’s ability to be good. A song shorter than three minutes necessarily has less time to establish its greatness and sustain it, less time for an iconic intro, less time for memorable verses, less time for an unforgettable chorus, less time for a legendary solo, less time for guest features and less time for an outro that ties it all together. All of this compounds to result in a song that fails to reach the emotional heights of its theoretical unabridged counterpart. In this way, short songs are usually ginormous wastes of potential.
This is not to say a song has to be long to be good, but rather that increasing a song’s length heightens its potential creativity, its potential to build tension and its room for innovation. This is why the length of great songs is often a fundamental component of their greatness. Queen’s six-minute “Bohemian Rhapsody” would not be the ultimate road trip sing-along song if half of it were to go missing. What’s more is songs can benefit from being longer regardless of genre. Take rock’s eight-minute “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin, pop’s nine-minute “Purple Rain” by Prince or six-minute “Thriller” by Michael Jackson, rap’s 12-minute “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” by Kendrick Lamar or nine-minute “Runaway” by Kanye West, R&B’s 10-minute “Pyramids” by Frank Ocean, jazz’s nine-minute “So What” by Miles Davis or classical’s 11-minute “Ode to Joy” by Beethoven, all of which are undeniably great due to their length.
Willingly consuming short songs concocted for mindless virality (looking at you PinkPantheress) is no different from embracing shrinkflation with open arms. It’s the doomscrolling of music, but instead of a minute-long Instagram reel, it’s a minute-long shell of a song. This isn’t me pompously preaching, however. I say all this having played EsDeeKid’s “Prague” 122 times in the last week, which is one minute and 36 seconds long. I love a good two-and-a-half-minute “I Just Threw Out The Love Of My Dreams” by Weezer or “Boys Don’t Cry” by the Cure. I love PinkPantheress. Except, I would love her more if her songs were longer, because her songs would be even better. And I suspect that short song enjoyers secretly agree. After all, the same people who endlessly consume ever-shorter songs are the ones who rejoiced when Taylor Swift made a 10-minute version of “All Too Well.” That version would not have both topped the Billboard Hot 100 — becoming the longest song to ever do so — and received universal acclaim from fans and critics alike were it possible for a song to be ‘too long to be good.’
Our attention spans are fighting for their lives out here. Let’s give them a hand and choose to listen to art rather than formulaic, musical kibble. We can do better than give in to Big Music and mindlessly play their commodified soundslop.
Gustavo Ponzoa is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at gap87@cornell.edu.
Gustavo Ponzoa is a member of the Class of 2029 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a contributor for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at gap87@cornell.edu.
