Kpopalypse’s unpopular opinion – why I like the trend of shorter songs in k-pop

Several observant people have been noticing that k-pop songs have been getting somewhat shorter lately, and so have I. What’s behind this trend, and why do I think this is a positive thing? Are k-pop companies just being lazy bitches? Let’s discuss – and by “discuss” I mean Kpopalypse will shove his boring opinion down your throat and you will deal with it investigate the situation thoroughly!

So to kick this off, let’s just do a random search and see what people have been saying about this trend. I’ve just searched up the topic on YouTube and picked out the top few results.

This video from everglow-up earnestly conflates shorter songs with “mediocrity” and “lack of effort”. He also has some other weird statements in here, like “one of the major advantages of being a k-pop fan is the ability to wield the power we have over companies…” oh, my sweet child. However the central point that songs being shorter is related to how streaming revenues work, is absolutely correct.

DareDB’s video on the same topic is better as it spends less time moralising and more time touching on the actual economic reasons for shorter song lengths although “we’ve gone from k-pop as an art form to k-pop as a content form” is pretty subjective because it was never not both of those things.

Another video from Laina Sunflower, and this one’s also pretty good, addressing a lot of the same points (and I’m right with her on loving the extra-long drama videos) but once again there’s the implication that shorter songs at least has the potential to somehow be a really negative thing.

Basically all the videos do agree on the key aspects of this change:

• Music revenues today are ruled by streaming services
• Streaming is a numbers game
• Payouts are calculated by the amount of listens, not the time spent listening
• So the shorter a song is, the quicker it’s over and the quicker you can hopefully play it again and earn the creator another $0.004 (yes that’s the real Spotify streaming payout rate, and it’s even worse on TikTok, don’t spend those earnings all at once kids)
• The enhanced play stats of the song having being listened to more also means a more favourable position in playlists, recommends etc, because the replays of shorter songs make them rank higher, particularly relevant for k-pop where the revenue from streaming usually isn’t very relevant but the brand value from exposure is more important

So the current trend is technology driven, and more specifically, driven by the metrics that companies are using to convert music-listening into money, that’s something we can all agree on. It’s not just k-pop fans who have noticed either, here’s a video of YouTuber Gabi Belle discussing the “Tiktokification” of music:

She correctly traces the current “short songs” trend to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” going super viral on that platform, leading the big record labels to notice and change their focus to more TikTok-friendly short-form content, where the video length maximum was (at that time) one minute. However it’s also true that music was trending this way gradually anyway even before the advent of TikTok, with other streaming services such as Spotify etc having a similar impact.

Song lengths (white line) and tempos (green line) 1958-2019. Source

If we look at recent recorded history of songs that charted in the Billboard 100 (which all k-pop fans agree is a terribly important measure as long as their faves get on it somewhere), longer songs was a trend that peaked in 1992. With the new short-songs trend, we’re gradually getting back to how it was in the 1950s and 1960s.

The idea of music trends following trends in technology of music delivery is nothing new and can be traced back to the days of the fast-spinning 78 RPM shellac record, which debuted in 1898, the first widely-available commercial music format.

Most 78 RPM records were ten inches wide, allowing a playtime of only three minutes, so songwriters wanting to utilise this new format were under pressure to stick to the time limit and edit their material to suit. There was also a twelve inch version of the shellac record that could contain up to five minutes of song, but these were more expensive to produce, so if you were commercial-savvy or just budget-conscious you were better off making something shorter that could fit on the ten inch disk.

Commercial radio was the other major factor keeping songs short, with the first commercial radio stations appearing in 1920, and once again time equals money in this new listening format. If you wanted your song to get radio play, it had better be short, sharp and shiny so it didn’t get in the way of all the other stuff that the radio also wanted to put to air, like ads and so forth. In the late 1940s vinyl was introduced which replaced the shellac records, and a new seven inch format was used for pop singles that had a six minute maximum length (with the old twelve inch shellac size being reserved for the first LPs or “long play” albums) but most singles didn’t bother to use the whole six minutes per side, because of the desire to get a hit on commercial radio. When music television later appeared, the same pressures existed, because your song now had to be squeezed in between all the TV ads – the “algorithm” back then, just as now, still favoured brevity.

There’s a few different arguments presented about why short songs are ‘bad’, so let’s look at them. The first one is structural:

This is a screencap from the Gabi Belle video where she breaks down common song structure recently-ish (left) vs the new common song structure that’s popular now (right). Her argument is that musicians are now leading with the chorus in a cut-down song structure because the chorus usually has the hook that has the most viral possibility. She’s not saying that it’s a bad thing directly, but she’s certainly implying that the chorus is being put first in the song for Tiktok-related marketing reasons. So how does this compare to pop songs from years ago?

The Beatles’ “Love Me Do” is 2:24 in length and leads with the chorus.

The Beatles’ “She Loves You” is 2:18 in length and leads with the chorus.

The Supremes’ “Baby Love” is 2:03 in length and leads with the chorus.

Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” is 2:13 in length and leads with the chorus.

Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” is less than 2:00 and leads with the chorus.

I could go on with dozens of these, but you get the idea. A song of 2:30 at most (but usually less) and with the chorus first was standard practice in the 1950s and 1960s. It could be equally argued that the chorus-leading is a “retro” movement rather than marketing.

Then there’s the argument, mentioned in the everglow-up video, that chopping out sections of a song is somehow “lazy” or “less artistic”. However short songs don’t usually have less parts, what they usually have instead is less repetition of the existing parts. They still have a verse and a chorus and often some other bits too, they’ll just be repeated less times.

NewJeans “ETA” has a verse, a prechorus and a chorus, both repeated twice, the same three bits most pop songs have, it just takes less time to do them all because it’s quick. What’s lazier – writing a short song with more unique material per second of music, or writing a longer song which just has all the different bits copy-pasted more? Would wrapping it all around a third time, or adding in a momentum-killing breakdown, really have made the song any better? I fucking doubt it. “Don’t waste it, your time’s a bank” as the song says.

Soojin’s “Mona Lisa” is 2:43 in length and actually starts off with the post-second chorus breakdown, now that’s something fairly new for k-pop. Even though I’m not wild about the song for other reasons, it’s an interesting choice. It also still manages to squeeze in two verses, two pre-choruses, two choruses, and a finishing instrumental dance section. Can’t complain about the musical variety at least.

Young Posse’s “Macaroni Cheese” (which I’ll admit, is growing on me despite me throwing it in the worst list when it came out, because I’ve had to relisten to it a bunch of times so I can ‘pop it like a cheese’ correctly when discussing k-pop’s creepy youth obsession) goes straight from an intro to the chorus, then comes back to the verse later, before following the “new” Gabi Belle song structure. It also finds time to tack an outro on at the end of it all and remain just under the three minute mark. Note that Young Posse are essentially a rap group and starting with the chorus has been a thing in rap music ever since rap music first started.

So enough about why other people hate short songs – why do I like them? Partly, it’s what DareDB said in his video – time is money, and I’m not cheap! When I was younger I had the time to listen to 20 minute prog rock excursions but these days I’m an adult who needs to pay the bills plus I have adult responsibilities like compiling lists of your favourite most attractive k-pop artists. Also, short songs make writing those roundups a hell of a lot quicker.

Also a lot of the music that I love now and also in the past is short as fuck, and short doesn’t necessarily mean repetitive or less creative either.

The structure here is intro, verse, chorus, breakdown, then that’s it. Nothing gets repeated. And creative… flutes, in a hardcore song? Your faves could never. You don’t need to drag a song on for fucking ever to do different shit.

This song’s only just over one minute long, and has no repeated sections, no fat on it at all. I don’t even think I can summarise it in terms of structure, it just is what it is – better than your bias.

But what about old shit? Some of the YouTubers above singled out Lil Nas X’s “Montero” album for having short songs but I’d just like to point out that most of the tracks on Slayer’s “Reign In Blood” are under the three minute mark, and this was in the 1980s when longer songs were just about to peak. I remember the official cassette copy of the album was dubbed onto both sides of a 60 minute tape so you didn’t have to rewind it, genius.

Another classic album with short songs.

And another. This list could go on forever.

But if you don’t like heavy music but prefer the k-pops just remember that the best album song from k-pop’s golden age is also less than three minutes.

That should be all the reason you need.