Our Attention Spans are Short n' Sweet

It is no secret that our attention spans are worse than they have ever been before. With millions of options of short-form entertainment available at our fingertips, we are unknowingly consuming more media than ever before possible. What we may not realize, however, is how consuming this type of content is worsening our ability to appreciate things in their entirety.

Instead of reading a full paper, we watch a summary and assume we know it all. Instead of watching a full game, we watch the highlight reel, and instead of listening to full albums, we hear a 30-second snippet of a song behind a post that has nothing to do with the song itself.  

When it comes to the music industry, our short-lived listening habits have been the driving force of “hit” culture. 

Listening to records as a full body of work is something musicians have emphasized the importance of since the beginning of time. To place it in perspective, you wouldn’t go to the ballet and listen to just one act of one scene of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and then get up and leave. It is a story told through music. If you cherry-pick just one part of it to listen to, you are depriving yourself of the entire thesis of the work.

Some may argue that it just isn’t that deep. Times change, and so the way we consume art should change with it. It might be overly pretentious to expect everyone to care about full records and that hit culture is what keeps the music industry afloat. I, however, think otherwise. 

After hearing about artists' greatest gripes and complaints towards their record labels, one of the most common issues they have is the emphasis labels place on making “hits” rather than quality meaningful music. 

Additionally, while artists typically strive to make full-length albums, record labels often ask them to make EPs or release multiple singles and remixes instead. With newer, less successful artists, record labels often make them put out this type of work first as they are trying to test and see if consumers will listen. If it happens to do well, then they are allowed to create what they intended to make—an album. 

This shows that the labels have picked up on the trend of people being less invested in artists' work unless a hit precedes them. This, of course, is a smart business decision as it prevents labels from overspending on artists who will not bring in a large amount of profit. At the same time, it creates questions about the real intention of releasing music in the first place, and whether they would stop doing this if consumers were more willing to listen. 

In the mainstream pop music world, this phenomenon is prevalent. This can be seen with recent albums such as Ariana Grande’s eternal sunshine with a 36-minute playtime, Billie Eillish’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT with a 44-minute playtime, and a name that wraps it all in a bow, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet with a 36-minute playtime. All of these albums are LPs released by some of the biggest artists in the industry, yet the length of the albums is reminiscent of an EP. On the complete opposite side of the scale, mainstream artists like Taylor Swift releasing 2 hour long Anthologies such as her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. 

It seems as though artists are either too afraid of releasing medium—to long-length albums because they fear people will not be able to listen and appreciate them, or they are releasing absolutely everything in hopes that something will stick. 

These extremes reflect the intense fluctuation of people’s listening habits in recent times and show how we, as listeners, shape the way the music industry operates.

And to those who had the attention span to read through all of this, you are a shining light of hope.