Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

One researcher found that a quarter of the songs from the Billboard Hot 100 from the 1960s to 1990s featured a key change, but only one song in the 2010s did. Where the nineties had rambling narrative songs like Biggie’s “Juicy” and Tim McGraw’s “Something Like That,” or the Streets’s 2004 concept album A Grand Don’t Come for Free, storytelling in general in pop music also seems to have lately fallen off in favor of overall vibes and moods. Lyrics avoid requiring too much attention from the listener. Streaming-era songs are often brief, too—Grimes, for the deluxe version of her 2020 album Miss Anthropocene, released a few “Algorithm Mix” iterations of songs, cutting down their run time, making them denser and more immediately compelling, better for algorithmic feeds. (It’s not dissimilar to the “radio mixes” of the past.) On average, hit songs have gotten shorter in the past two decades, decreasing a total of thirty seconds from 4:30 in 1995 to 3:42 in 2019. Data scientists at UCLA calculated that the average length of a song released in 2020 on Spotify was just 3:17, and that length is trending even shorter. The musicologist Nate Sloan has argued that the collective shortening is caused by the incentives of streaming services—Spotify, for example, counts thirty seconds of listening as a “play” and pays out royalties based on that metric. There’s no financial benefit to going any longer.