TikTok made songs shrink, but artists are pushing back

Lady Gaga fixes me with a withering stare.

I’ve just asked her a simple, but apparently impertinent, question: “What’s the perfect length for a pop song?”

“Whatever length the artist wants is the perfect length,” she intones.

It’s a fair answer, but the charts suggest otherwise.

Songs got drastically shorter in the streaming era. But new BBC research shows that trend is over…

“When TikTok came along, it changed a lot of things,” says Ines Dunn, a songwriter with credits on hits like Mimi Webb’s House On Fire (2m 20s) and Maisie Peters’ Run (2m 49s).

“People’s attention span dropped quite dramatically. You tune in for 20 seconds of a song, you don’t know the name of the artist, you don’t know anything, really. You just love that bit of music.”

But musicians soon discovered that there’s a reason why TikTok is named after the sound of a ticking clock.

“You had to get people’s attention in the first two seconds, and it only really mattered if the song had one line that did well,” says Claudia Valentina, a British pop singer who’s just scored two global hits as a writer on Blackpink’s Jump (2m 44s) and Jennie’s Mantra (2m 16s).

“I remember being like, ‘Why would I even finish the song? I might as well just make a 30 second thing that’s a meme, so that it’ll go viral’.”

Valentina wasn’t the only person thinking like that.

In London, a film student called Victoria Walker started posting unfinished snippets of music to TikTok, using the app as a crowd-sourced quality filter.

If a track gained enough likes, she’d finish it and release it under her stage name, PinkPantheress.

But even then, she found it pointless to stick to traditional song structures.

“I just get really tired of singing the same melody again and again,” she told me in 2022 . “By the time I’ve finished one melody, I’m like, ‘OK, I can do better,’ so then I move on to another one and another one.”

With hits like Attracted To You (1m 07s), I Must Apologise (1m 48s) and Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2 (2m 11s), PinkPantheress became emblematic of attention deficit pop.

“Every time I write a song, I think it’s going to be three minutes – then I see the length and it’s always, like, one minute,” PinkPantheress told me.

“So it’s not something I consciously do but it just ends up being the case. I don’t think it necessarily is a bad thing.”